I've finished my play with the alarm for now. The (hacked - Visonic don't publish it) description of the protocol wasn't as complete as I'd expected but it contained enough for my needs. I'm not entirely happy with my use of XPL but it was the easiest route for me to take as my existing programs work with that without modification to code.

(My main server just passes this text format around to other stand alone components that interface between it and hardware, eg. my new alarm program is a sort of Visonic to/from XPL component. I just "invent" a schema and add an entry to one database table like:

schemaid: "visonic.jf", description: "Visonic Alarm interface", address type: "ac", nodisplay: "address,unit", action:"update".

And in another say tell it that commands are "Arm Home", "Arm Away" and "Disarm".

And that's it. The server then knows enough to work with it.).

Here is a snapshot of my simple PC based control panel which communicates with the server. I'd maybe like to separate security items out to a new tab but it works as is. I can see event changes eg. an alarm motion sensor is tripped and I see the current status of the alarm panel (eg. is it armed) and the sensors (door open, tamper alert, battery low, etc.).

I can also use this data in my scripts so if say the front room sensor was tripped when the alarm system is in armed state, I could turn the lights on in there and tell the camera to start emailing pictures. As it stands I can also arm/disarm the panel from there but I'm not sure I want that..

I've got one outside light to change (I thought a bulkhead would be right but it didn't really work and have a 10W flood to go there instead). After that, maybe I do have a big clear out and take a break. I still owe Pip for some of the stuff I'm supposed to be paying for (in the rush to get things done, I got ahead of my own finances) and maybe, while there are not really many lights, etc. here, maybe as a bit of a home project, I've had enough for a while.