Home-brewed "weather station" software

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rmt38

320 posts

Ultimate Geek
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#1613020 17-Aug-2016 09:22

richms:

I might grab a couple of the metal fancy ones, since I think that the problems I had in the past were overheating related causing the tuner to die.

In anycase, tuning them to 315000000 also gets the little keychain remotes I got for some other purpose appearing in there as well, which is great.

Has anyone found any details of getting this running on a pi or something and sending the data to something useful? If I could get cheap 315MHz aliexpress motion sensors being recieved it would be a good alternative to the ugly bulky wemo ones I have at the moment.

Here's a simple tutorial which covers installing the drivers and sending the raw data over tcp (to a pc running sdrsharp). Running the rtl_433 tool wouldn't be that much more complex, as I believe it's based on the same tools. And that was just the first google result I clicked.

Someone a few posts above suggested some software that graphs and stuff (WeeWX). I think that can be installed on the pi, and used to upload it's output to a server over wifi. Though that's not motion sensor related.

If you want two sdr receivers in the same pi, then there's a model shaped to suit that. I'm not sure, might be one of the nooelec models. I can't remember.

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richms

28039 posts

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#1614304 19-Aug-2016 12:26

Ok well that was interesting. Ordered 2 of the rtl-sdrs from that site, and they arrived today in a NZ post bag from someone in NZ.

Something to get underway once I have got the rest of the gravel blocking the driveway spread out so I can get my flexibin taken away.

Anyway, have also ordered a MMDS downconverter off aliexpress, just want to really see if I can see the frequancy that these newer limitless LED lamps use since my efforts so far have not yeilded anything useful.

Richard rich.ms

msukiwi

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#1614313 19-Aug-2016 12:37

RTL-SDR sticks can be bought from the NZ "Agent" (I have purchased many).

Look for member "projectilefish" on TM. He is very sharp on price and fast.

meesham

973 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1622472 4-Sep-2016 15:48

My cheap tuner has arrived and I've set it up with an old Pi 1B I had sitting on the shelf. I originally had it plugged into my server and did a USB passthrough with KVM to my main virtual machine for processing data but it kept causing freezes for some reason. To get the data back to my main app I'm using mqtt which seems to be perfect for this sort of data. Getting rtl_433 running on the Pi was a piece of cake with Raspbian Jessie, you just need to install cmake and rtl-sdr using apt and then follow the install instructions on the rtl_433 github page. If you want to send the data to mqtt you'll need to install the mosquitto-clients package and then run the following (this is someone else's script, I've just added the QoS 2 setting and added a minor bugfix for logging):

#!/bin/bash

# A simple script that will receive events from a RTL433 SDR

# Author: Marco Verleun <marco@marcoach.nl>
# Version 2.0: Adapted for the new output format of rtl_433

# Remove hash on next line for debugging
#set -x

export LANG=C
PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin"

MQTT_HOST="yourserveraddress"

#
# Start the listener and enter an endless loop
#
/usr/local/bin/rtl_433 -F json | while read line
do
# Log to file if file exists.
# Create file with touch /tmp/rtl_433.log if logging is needed
[ -w /tmp/rtl_433.log ] && echo $line >> /tmp/rtl_433.log

# Raw message to MQTT
echo $line| /usr/bin/mosquitto_pub -h $MQTT_HOST -i RTL_433 -q 2 -l -t "RTL_433/Raw"
done

You'll then just need a MQTT subscriber to process the data which will be in JSON format. I'm managing the bash script with systemd so that it auto starts if the Pi ever gets rebooted for some reason.

I've got 3 old LaCrosse TX Temperature / Humidity Sensor for indoors but only one of them is still working unfortunately, does anyone have any recommendations for cheap indoor sensors that are supported by rtl_433? One disappointing thing is the WH3081 isn't fully supported, the basic information is handled by the WS1080 processor but the extra data like UV and luminance isn't (they're sent as separate broadcasts), I've started trying to add support for it but my C is pretty rusty.

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