About the ALARM-A201P-16WE
The ALARM-A201P-16WE is the control panel at the heart of HiLook's wireless alarm range. It is the piece that everything else talks to, the part that decides when to raise an alarm, and the part that sends the notification to your phone. If you already have a HiLook kit and want to expand it, or you are building a system from individual parts rather than buying a bundle, this is where you start.
It supports up to 16 wireless zones, which in plain terms means up to 16 detectors, door contacts or other sensors around the property. On top of that it handles 16 keyfobs, 4 wireless keypads and 4 wireless sounders, so a whole household can have their own fob and you can put a keypad by the front door and a siren where it will actually be heard. There is room for 12 users and a log of the last 1,000 events, so you can look back and see exactly who armed the system and when.
One feature worth understanding is the four areas. The panel can divide your property into four separate parts that arm and disarm independently. A house and a detached garage, for example, or a shop floor and a stockroom behind it. That means you can lock up the part you are not using without having to arm the whole building, which in practice is what stops people giving up on an alarm and leaving it switched off.
All the wireless devices talk to the panel on the 868 MHz band. This is the band used by proper alarm equipment rather than the crowded 2.4 GHz that your Wi-Fi, your Bluetooth speaker and your smart plugs are all fighting over. It goes through walls and floors far better, which matters in an older solid walled house, and HiLook quote up to 2,000 m of range in the open, so distance is never the limiting factor in a normal property. The signal hops between frequencies to resist jamming and is encrypted with AES-128, so it cannot simply be listened to or spoofed.
For getting online, you have the choice of plugging it into your router with a network cable or connecting over Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n. A cable is the more reliable option if the panel is near the router. Either way you get push notifications through the app covering alarms, faults, system events and everyday operations, so you find out about a flat battery in a sensor as well as an actual break-in. The panel updates its own firmware over the internet, so it stays current without you doing anything.
It runs from a normal mains socket and has a backup battery built in, good for up to 12 hours if the power goes off. That matters more than it sounds, because cutting the power is the obvious first move for anyone hoping to defeat an alarm. The case is tamper protected too, so opening it raises an alert.
