I am a noob in Home Automation, but eager to get my home smart. I just received my cheap 433Mhz Superheterodyne RF receiver and transmitter (from Aokin DiyMaker Store) which i connected to my Raspberry PI3.
I SSH into openhabian and follow the instruction (like installing Python3 etc), in the end of the tutorial i need to install (?) receive.py and send.py, so i can sniff my kaku hardware.
I installed the pre-configured image on my raspberry. Can anybody help me out with installing my RF receiver and transmitter, and what the next steps are.
Since I am the noob, I was hoping you could explain me what the relation is with openhab, besides using openhab with the rf transmitter to control my Kaku.
You followed the instructions from somebody located somewhere else on the Internet. Ask THEM why their instructions do not work. We are not responsible for random instructions in the Internet.
I am not asking you to be accountable for “random” instructions. I installed openhab on my raspberry and trying to control my kaku through the 433Mhz transceiver in openhab.
I guess i need to install drivers/firmware (for the 433Mhz transceiver) on my raspberry before i can add a “binding” in openhab?
There are many ways you can interact with 433MHz stuff. The method that I found working for my needs, at least for receiving (I have no need to transmit) is using RFLink. It needs to be installed on an Arduino Mega connected to your transmitter and superheterodyne receiver. It suit me well because I happen to have an old Arduino Mega sitting around unused. RFLink (on the Arduino) connects to the computer that runs OpenHAB (in your case, your Raspberry Pi?) via USB and it is seen as a serial link. I then use a Serial binding to read the data from RFLink. It’s a simple plain text data that I parsed using basic string parsing (splitting the delimiters). You would need to figure out how to flash the RFLink to Arduino, if you haven’t done that, it could be a challenge. You can find more info on rflink’s website about it. This place is more about how to connect that with openhab once you have a functioning device.
PS there seems to be a mention about “Kaku” on rflink’s site. Not sure if that’s the same device you have.
There are other, probably better/easier ways for sure, e.g. using Sonoff RF bridge, etc. I haven’t tried those so I can’t explain further.
@JimT, that’s gives me a bit more context and some tips how to get it all working. Thanks for the detailed explanation! Ill keep posted when I made some progress!
I changed the title. Because RFX-com is a complete hardware product which contains, besides the 433 Mhz receivers and transmitters, hardware to connect that hardware via usb to a computer and software to convert the raw rf signals to readable signals.
What you now have is only some small part of the puzzle.The hardware can only send and receive signals and doesn’t know anything about protocols. So if you would want to make this work the way your approached this you need to decode the kaku protocol and then convert those signals into bits and bytes and then get that data into openHAB. For the latter you would probably need to write a binding, or write some python from the script you mentioned, because you need convert those signals to openHAB readable data.
If you like DIY this can be a feasible approach, but you would need to understand what you’re doing and not have to rely on asking basic questions, because it will simple be to hard to do.
If you just want to automate your house you can go either with the RFLink software mentioned by JimT. This needs some extra work and you need to know how to program an arduino among other things. Or invest in a RFX-com that works out-of-the box with openHAB.
I´m not experienced in this, (yet). I got myself a rtl-sdr dongle (DVB-T receiver) which I will be using when I get there. I just havn´t had time to look more into it, (because the dongle I bought has a too big cabin, so it can no go directly into a Rpi ).
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