Aqara alarm sound through the HomePod

Last week we talked about the possibility of using a HomeKit-compatible sensor and using the HomePod as a speaker for the alarm sound. This automation gives us a fairly basic but functional feature. Sure, a burglar could say ‘Hey Lola, stop the music‘ and kill the sound… although we can always disable the ‘Hey Lola‘ trigger on that HomePod near the door where the alarm is blaring at full blast.

Setting up the Aqara bridge to work as an alarm

The basic functionality is fine and can be useful, but if you have an Aqara bridge, any of them, you’ll have noticed that the options available through the Xiaomi Home app or the Aqara app are quite a bit more extensive. We can set up several sensors as triggers, we can set a grace period both for coming into the house without triggering the alarm (like we mentioned the other day about coming up from the garage with no coverage without setting it off) as well as a grace period for leaving the house so that the motion sensor, if configured as a trigger, doesn’t catch us walking out and set off the alarm. As I mentioned before, this can be done with any Aqara model, from the oldest ones that still have the Xiaomi logo to the more modern ones like the M1S and M2.

Different alarm modes on the M1S and M2 bridges

But on the newer models there’s a feature that’s really cool: the ability to create different alarm scenarios. By default we have 4 modes: 24×7 disarmed mode where nothing happens, an away mode, a home mode, and a night mode. It might seem trivial, but it’s actually quite useful. Imagine, for example, that we live in a two-story house: we can set it up so that at night the alarm goes off if the sensors downstairs detect an open door or window, motion, etc… but the sensors upstairs won’t trigger the alarm because we’re up there and might go to the bathroom or move between rooms. However, when we’re out of the house, any sensor can set off the alarm, no matter which floor it’s on. I don’t live in a two-story house and I still use the modes. In this image you can see that in ‘Leaving home’ mode I have 2 sensors set as triggers, the front door and the porch door… but when I’m home I might open the porch door, so in that case I only want it to go off if the front door opens. The only downside of the Aqara bridge alarm is that if you have the M2 bridge, which doesn’t have a speaker, the sound volume is quite low, so if your bridge is a bit far from the entrance it might go off and nobody will hear it, meaning it won’t work as a deterrent for burglars. If you have the M1S or similar with the speaker it’ll sound a bit louder… but the same problem applies: if it’s far from the entrance, it’ll sound ‘distant’ and won’t do its job properly.

Alarm volume

The solution is to set up the alarm so the sound comes out through a HomePod. If you have several HomePods, you can of course set it up so it plays through all of them. The process is similar to what I described in the previous post, since this isn’t done from the bridge configuration in the Aqara or Xiaomi Home app, but is instead set up from the Home app. It’s a shame, but this can’t be done directly from the Home app, where we’ll see the different modes but won’t be able to configure them. To do this, we first need to configure the triggers, grace periods, etc., in the Aqara or Xiaomi Home app, as well as the different modes. Once the sensors that will trigger the alarm are configured, we need to open the Home app and create a new Automation. This time we need to select ‘When an accessory is controlled’ as the Event, instead of ‘When a sensor detects something’ which is what we did in the previous post. Once here, we’ll see the list of all our accessories and we need to pick the Aqara bridge alarm, which, once integrated with HomeKit, will show up in the Home app as ‘Security System’. Now we’ll see 3 options: ‘Is Triggered’, ‘Is Disarmed’, and ‘Is Armed’. Let me explain each one, but do you know what this means? That we can use that ‘tuit tuit’ sound old car alarms used to make for when the alarm is disarmed! I told you I was going to find a way to use that sound because I love it! Hahaha The thing is, for the feature we’re looking for right now, we need to choose the ‘Is Triggered’ option. The Time and People conditions don’t really matter to us here, since the actual triggers are configured in the Xiaomi Home or Aqara app and we’re the ones manually activating the mode, so if we activate the alarm in Night Mode it’s because it’s night, and the condition here doesn’t matter… or if we activate the alarm with ‘Away’ mode it’s because we’re away from home, no need for the Home app to check whether someone’s home or not. By tapping Next we can now select the HomePod or HomePods we want the alarm to play through when triggered, and from here we just follow the same steps as in the previous post: select the Audio to play, look for an album of sounds or noises that seem appropriate (I have a friend who searched for dog barks and through the HomePod they sound VERY real), and also remember to set the sound to loop since it only lasts a few seconds, and select a custom alarm volume so it blasts at full volume regardless of the HomePod’s volume setting at that moment. Lastly, we can Turn Off the automation after X minutes, just like we do with the rest of our automations. Easy, right? From there you can make it as complicated as you want, adding automations to arm the alarm automatically when our phones leave home, disarming it as we’re approaching, etc., although I think the interesting part of setting up the alarm this way is that you can arm and disarm it manually. Well, you can always create an NFC automation to arm the alarm when you tap your phone against an NFC sticker, like we covered a few months ago, it looks pretty slick done that way, you can see it in this short video: Also remember that this automation will actually send us a notification if the alarm goes off, unlike the one in the previous post where we had to set up the notification directly on the sensor.

BONUS TRACK: Tuit tuit sound when disarming the alarm

I don’t think I need to explain this, but if, when creating the automation, at the point where we choose between ‘Is Triggered’, ‘Is Armed’, or ‘Is Disarmed’ we pick this last option, we can then select the HomePod and add that classic old car alarm disarm chirp (Alarm DISARM from the album I mentioned the other day), so when we disarm the alarm, this automation will trigger and we’ll hear that sound. The only thing to keep in mind is to turn off the Repeat option so it only plays once.