New Member - Looking to hook into my home 433MHz transmissions...temp/power/etc...

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Billy22Bob

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I've just been renovating and have a couple of transmitters for temp/power consumption transmitting on the 433MHz band.
I'd like to assemble some form of reciever board that can read the mish mash of signals into an RS232 or USB and then try to program code to decypher the streams for logging into the home computer.

Any ideas orlinks appreciated.

b22b
 
We need to know what modulation and protocol the transmitters that you already have are using. Got any model numbers/manufacturer names to share?
 
well

The Temperature is a LacrosseTechnologies -but I've just discovered it is operating on the 915MHz band- still, that just means 2 receivers - I guess.
**broken link removed**

The Power Meter is an Efergy unit out of the UK operating on the 433MHz spectrum.
**broken link removed**
 
I'm *guessing* he's using generic ones which require a fair bit of baseband coding and are pretty slow ~2400bps. For convenience a microcontroller's UART could spit out manchester encoded data (4 bits per UART packet). O#, sure it could all be done with a single micro at each end, but it all depends on your capabilities, if you even have support for microcontrollers (compilers/programmer etc..). For temp/power measurement, you're talking a very low data rate, which makes life a lot easier, and opens things up to doing everything in software as opposed to relying on certain peripherals a micro has. Both Microchip and Atmel have great app notes on such systems.

I can highly recommend Low power radio solutions' Modules. They truely are 'wireless RS232', and despite the price, if you're only using a few, they are well worth it, handling the RF, baseband, and error detection for you. In fact there are many of these intelligent modules around, not many on the 433 band, but they do exist and are very cheap. Find a place avaliable to you, online, such as farnell, mouser, digikey etc.. and search their sites. Make a list of ones which push all your buttons, then order a couple of the cheapest to tinker with.

As for USB, I've found for low datarate apps, nothing beats a RS232 -> USB cable. Stupidly cheap, easy to interface to a microcontroller, and easy to code on the host side. Essentially just RS232 with power.

With an RF module, micro, and USB-serial cable, you can build a pretty robust and cheap RF link for measurement and control. I must have 4 of these systems around my place.
 
Still waiting.....

I posted some info a couple of times a couple of days ago but they are still in limbo...ie: with the moderator I guess....

apologies....

b22b


oh...well that got htrough straight away....

will post asap with detail from previous....missing posts....
 
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Ahh so your sensors/transmitters are prebuilt? This actually makes life a lot tougher, since you would need to 'hack' the recievers, in order to get data out of them, and format it for connection to your PC. Unless the above units have some form of 'data out', reverse engineering them is a hell of a lot of work. But I'm all for hardware hacking As long as you're aware that, even though buying commercial units is cheaper and more reliable, its just as much work modifying them as it is making your own system from scratch.

Most of these units will have a single processor which reads raw data from the RF side, decodes, and controls the display. So finding a connection on the board to 'tap' this info won't be easy as its all inside the chip.
 
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Too bad they are not ZigBee sensors. That would make this less difficult.

Focus on one sensor at at time.

The EFERGY E2 sensor info states

It includes an innovative software package so you can track your energy usage on your computer.
Elsewhere I find

Efergy e2 USB Wireless Energy Monitor


Do you have an older unit without USB and the PC software ?
 
To add to the fun - Power Point control....

No - I've got the basic version without the USB.
I've just picked up some winplus power point controllers from Aldi supermarket chain here in Australia. They run on 433 as well.
And a door bell.
Just need to;
1. Build an RS232 or USB 433MHz transiever
2. work out the protocols used
3. get my home theatre PC to run my power points and
4. receive temperature data....

ezy....;>)
 
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I have not done this sort of thing but here is what I would do.



Start with a sniffer.(EDIT: see what Blueteeth wrote above) Just listen to 433MHz and displays the high low's. With some work you can figure out the data rate write code to display bytes.

Start by turning off all you 433MHz stuff and see if you are getting any from your neighbors.

If no stray transmissions turn on one device.

Once you have bytes you may be able to figure out what a packet looks like.

If you know the data the device is sending you may be able to find it within the packet.

Unless you are in this for fun buy sensors where you do not have to hack into them.
 
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There aren't many channels on the 433MHz band, (less than 10) but because of this, and the rate it is used for very low datarate control/telemetry, the packets are often quite long. This ensures no two devices that share the band interfere, it is not uncommon for > 16 bytes to be sent as an 'address', often more bits than the data it's sending.

If you have a receiver for your temp sensors/energy monitor - which you do - open this up and look for a sub board which will be the RF receiver. I doubt it will all be integrated, its far cheaper for them to use analogue RF modules. No doubt this will have a 'dataout' pin which you can use with a logic analyzer to probe. Or, if you're really savy, do what I do for reading RF/IR packets - write code on a microcontroller that learns the on/off times and picks up common bit patterns. After recieving a few packets it should be trained well enough to recognize the transmission, then you can format this information (HEX, ASCII etc..) to output to a PC/LCD for viewing. Thats a hell of a lot of work, but it works for most remote links.

It *may* of course be easier than this, depending on the circuits. Your energy monitor could well have the PCB footprints for the USB part, they just don't populate it for the cheaper 'non-USB' version. How about a nice photo of the guts on the receivers?
 
I've just sent a request to winplus....

relating to the new wireless power points I just purchased. These were only AUD/USD$7.50 each....or about 4.6pounds
**broken link removed**

In my email, in one of the points I mention....
"........3. I can work the following out - however - much easier if you can tell me - If I was to send a 433MHz pulse from an alternate transceiver to the power point, what is the protocol used - address's etc. to operate the units? Please note - this doesnt negate me buying more of your products, nor does it carry any risk for missuse of your products (I'm not opening them up or anything) - rather this could engender a whole new customer base for you through us geeks and our network......"

Sent to www.winplus.com.au
 
Dont ask you never find out.....

Winplus's response was.....
".....You should be able to use 433MHz, but a propriety protocol is used for the units to operate. Unfortunately, we aren’t able to disclose this information. ..."

Probably "as expected" to some.
 
Yeah doesn't surprised me

It doesn't hurt though, I often send out pinger emails, and obviously most of the time don't get a response, but when I do its a polite 'ha! no'. Which is fair, I certainly don't give out the specs for my designs, unless I get a cut Occassionally I'll come across a nice company who will provide any info I ask for, direct from their engineers (low power radio solutions, and RFMD being two examples).

But as its not a secure RF connection, I imagine the packet will be the same number of bytes, which the same value, except a few for the data, and perhaps a CRC checksum - but error correction is generally only needed for bi-directional communication, which seems a bit over kill for these units.

You might be able to get some free software off the internet to use your parallel port (or serial port) as a very crude logic analyzer. For 433Mhz the datarate is likely to be <1200bps. This will show you a nice waveform, and perhaps even some hex numbers. Who knows, with some clever PC coding it might even be a way for the PC to decode the protocol itself with a little app.
 
Winplus just responded further with....

Thanks for your further email.
I’m not sure of the exact answer to your question, I’m sorry about this.
I am able to advise the main components inside the unit are as follows:


Object Part -------Maufacturer/Trademark --------Type/Model
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Relay ------------Sanyou ------------------------SRD-S-124DM
Capacitor --------AD -----------------------------X2 MEX GPF

Maybe you can use these model numbers to look up the specific information you require?

I should reiterate that any tampering with the product will void the warranty, and the electrical approval of the product.
 
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So I'm suspecting I iopen up the Efergy or Winplus receiver....

find the RF Module....some sort of ADC and it's data out pin and hookup my analyser probe....?

Try to read som signals and decypher....

sweet.
 
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You shouldn't need an ADC, although many small RF modules generally output 'analogue', since the transmission is digital, you only really need to look for 'high/low'.

Best bet is to find a ground reference, most likely connected to the 0v of the battery terminal of the receiver. Then you can put your analyzer probe on each pin of the RF module to see what happens. Perhaps doing this first with a multimeter, so you can see which pins are power. A photo of its guts would be nice

I guess the problem here is that the transmitter only puts out a transmission every so often, so once you've found your 'data out' (which might be labeled on the PCB!) you would have to wait until the transmitter spits out a packet. Thankfully, if you have a logic analyzer (or even a cheap software one for a PC) they generally have a 'trigger', which means you can just arm it, and leave it - once theres a change on the probes input (be it low -> high, or high -> low) it'll start recording. a 10khz sample rate should be more than fast enough.

Now, so far I've been talking about reverse engineering by probing the circuit, which works for ANY system, but its a lot of work and a hassle. Its always preferable to first check out what IC's are on the board. Although many scrub off the part numbers, or use programmable microcontrollers (ie: all firmware) occasionally you'll see a chip with a part number, which may be of some use. Googling the datasheet of this tells you everything you need to know about it. This method saved me hours of work cloning a broken DVD remote control - since they used a well known IC', and its datasheet described the protocol perfectly. Rarely happens, but you never know.

Also, this is jsut how I would do it, if anyone else has better idea's, please post. You'll not only help the OP, but also those in a similar situation!
 
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