The reverse engineering of the Home Heartbeat was accomplished through use of a little monitor program I put together. It runs in your web browser and displays all of the state information of the sensors in real-time. You can see a running demo of the monitor >>>HERE<<<. You can grab a copy of the monitor and its source code here:

The monitor is written in JavaScript with a little bit of C for communication with the Home Heartbeat Base Station. There are three files which come into play. The first is the web page itself which is named hhb-monitor.html, and it includes another file called miniajax.js. Place these two files in the document directory of your web server. The server-side code is contained in hhb-get.cgi. Place this file in your web server cgi-bin directory. The included copy of hhb-get.cgi is known to work under Linux. It may have to be updated and recompiled for OS-X or Windows.

You will have to have properly installed serial drivers that communicate with the Base Station. If you have not already installed the drivers, then look >>>HERE<<< for assistance.

The code assumes that the device for access to the Base Station is at /dev/hhb. If you wish to use a different device name then edit hhb-get.c and recompile to get a new hhb-get.cgi. Recompilation is as simple as running make.

Since the demise of the Eaton Home Heartbeat monitoring services back in June of 2011, their customers have been left without any remote notification of their home’s status. Some enterprising hackers have taken up the cause to bring this abandoned system back to life. A few are frustrated home owners with idled Home Heartbeat systems, while others are tinkerers itching for a new project.  They took advantage of the hoards of surplus Home Heartbeat hardware that suddenly came on the market at pennies on the dollar.

The hardware has been dissected, photographed, analyzed, and documented. Investigations hoped for any avenue that could breath new life into these systems. They thought of interfacing the Eaton sensors with other ZigBee networks. They pondered the idea of reprogramming the on-board micro-controllers. But the idea that stuck is to use the Home Heartbeat system, unmodified, by interfacing to its unutilized USB port. Continue reading »