Frickelalarm in detail: setting up the alarm system that lives in Home Assistant

A few days ago I announced Frickelalarm here – an alarm-system integration for Home Assistant that brings the whole alarm logic with it. Since then the scaffold has turned into a genuinely usable system. Time for a proper write-up: what can it do, and how do you set it up?

Code and releases are out in the open at github.com/ankaios76/frickelalarm.

What Frickelalarm does

You've got door and window contacts, motion sensors, a siren and a phone. Frickelalarm is the piece in between: a clean alarm_control_panel with its own state machine – arm, delay running, triggered, disarm again – set up entirely through the UI, no YAML.

• Modes home / away / night / vacation, each with its own sensor selection
• Exit and entry delays, instant sensors and "always armed" (smoke/tamper)
• Reactions: switch siren/light and send notifications
• Automation: arm when everyone has left, disarm on arrival, night mode on a schedule
• Tamper detection, bypass, panic, logbook events
• its own Lovelace card in the Frickelfabrik look
• configurable through services – so it can even be set up by an LLM via MCP

Installation

Since Home Assistant 2026.11, HACS is built in as the Marketplace (Settings → Marketplace). Custom repositories still work.

1. Marketplace → menu (⋮) → Custom repositories → https://github.com/ankaios76/frickelalarm, category Integration.
2. Download "Frickelalarm" (it's a beta – enable "Show beta versions" in the download dialog), restart Home Assistant.
3. Settings → Devices & services → Add integration → "Frickelalarm".

Requires Home Assistant 2026.2 or newer.

The card

The integration ships its own Lovelace card and registers it automatically – no need to add a resource by hand. Drop it on the dashboard as a manual card:

type: custom:frickelalarm-card
entity: alarm_control_panel.haus_frickelalarm
name: House
keypad: collapsible   # optional: false | true | collapsible

It shows the state in colour, a countdown during the delays, the trigger, open and bypassed sensors – and, if you like, a collapsible number keypad for the code.

Setting it up

Everything can be changed at any time via Configure (the gear on the entry) – menu-driven:

• Sensors: pick door/window contacts, motion detectors … For each sensor: which modes it's armed in, "delayed" (uses the entry delay), "always armed".
• Delays & alarm duration: exit/entry delay and alarm duration in seconds.
• Reactions: actors (siren/light/switch) that turn on during an alarm and off afterwards, plus a notification service with a freely worded message.
• Automation: presence and night schedule (see below).
• General: code/PIN, tamper detection, and how open sensors when arming are handled (arm anyway / bypass & report / block arming).

Tip: put the front door on "delayed", but not the motion sensors – that way you can disarm when you get home, while an intruder coming through a window triggers immediately.

Automation: largely on its own

Under Configure → Automation:

• Auto-arm when all chosen people/trackers have left the home zone – with an adjustable delay. If someone comes back during the delay, nothing happens.
• Auto-disarm the moment the first person arrives – even during the entry delay or an alarm.
• Night mode on a schedule (start/end), optionally only when someone is home.

The switches can also be flipped at runtime via the frickelalarm.set_automation service.

Tamper, panic & open sensors

• Tamper/signal loss: if a sensor becomes unavailable while the system is armed, you get a notification and the frickelalarm_tamper event.
• Panic: frickelalarm.panic triggers immediately (or a long press on the card).
• Silence siren: frickelalarm.silence turns the actors off, the alarm keeps running silently.
• Arm now: frickelalarm.skip_exit_delay ends a running exit delay at once.
• Open sensors when arming are – depending on the setting – bypassed and reported; a bypassed sensor is monitored again automatically as soon as it closes.

Services & MCP – the special twist

Frickelalarm can be configured entirely through services, not just through the UI. That sounds unremarkable, but it has a nice effect: via the Home Assistant MCP server, a language model (e.g. Claude) can set the system up and operate it – add sensors, set times, arm/disarm, panic. That's exactly what comparable solutions can't do.

• frickelalarm.add_sensor / remove_sensor
• frickelalarm.set_times, frickelalarm.set_reactions, frickelalarm.set_automation
• frickelalarm.bypass / clear_bypass
• frickelalarm.panic / silence / skip_exit_delay
• frickelalarm.get_config (returns the whole current state)

It also fires events for the logbook and your own automations: frickelalarm_armed/arming/pending/triggered/disarmed and frickelalarm_tamper.

Get involved

This is a hobby/learning project of the Frickelfabrik and explicitly a beta – for trying out, breaking and reporting back. There's Alarmo, a mature and very popular solution with a similar feature set; Frickelalarm is built from scratch on purpose (learning, full control, a few own touches – and that MCP twist).

Ideas, bug reports and testers are welcome – best via the issues on GitHub.

Screenshots are from a German Home Assistant; the UI follows your HA user's language.