Hi, new to the community, new to esphome, and the last time I soldered was in highschool ( that should tell you everything about me. lol). I would like to know if there is a way for me to set up and configure an Adafruit RFM69HCW Transceiver Radio Breakout - 433 MHz (RadioFruit)
[ID:3071] with an Adafruit ESP32 Feather V2 with Headers - 8MB Flash + 2 MB PSRAM (STEMMA QT) [ID:5900] board? The breakout pins are confusing with identifying the interrupt and chip select pins, but I ran into some compiling errors in both ESPHome and Arduino. I think the Arduino errors are because the radio head libraries do not work with that board, but is it even possible to configure the YAML to support those two? I simply want to be able to have it send some codes to our blinds in our house to open at noon and close at sunset.
Thanks in advance for any help.
This would be my second project. My first was dealing with stemma connectors, and it took me forever to figure out how to set the pin high.
Isn’t that a LoRA module? The data sheet seems to imply it is optimised for LoRA - the SX1231 is a LoRA radio.
If you just want bare bones 433mHz there are other options and ESPHome components that support them. The components expect a seperate transmitter and receiver and use a single pin each for data.
Thanks, I will take a look at the kit… as I also want to set up an IR transmitter in the basement, so that will also help me understand what to do there.
While I understand why you went with the simple GPIO based transmitter for ease of connecting it to an ESPHome device, it is worth noting what you give up by choosing the cheap 433 MHz transmitter and receiver modules instead of the RFM69 chipset mentioned in the first post.
The passive 433 MHz transmitter and receiver kits, like the one linked in this thread, are inexpensive because they are extremely simple ASK/OOK modules with very few components. That means you have to handle modulation and timing issues manually in software and similar ie so you get what you pay for.
The RFM69 is a highly programmable radio chip for just a few bucks more that does not suffer from the self interference problem (meaning the transmitter looping back into the receiver), offers superior RF performance and has built in hardware modulation such as FSK, GFSK, MSK, GMSK and OOK among others. The RFM69 chipset is like ESPHome for RF devices if you like…
EDIT:
433 Mhz boards based on the rather smart CC1101 chip that supports ASK/OOK is also a good choice.
To my opinion, for simple OOK use, simple superheterodyne OOK receiver is the best choice. If you need to tune frequency or different modulation, then use “more complex” ones. CC1101 doesn’t yet have native esphome component.
If you’re just going to use the receiver to record and analyze modulation and signal timing, and then only the transmitter for outgoing traffic, a simple superheterodyne receiver works just fine.
But if you need to both send and receive, you’ll want a smart transmitter with some kind of self-interference protection, like time-division (TDM) or something similar…
EDIT:
Regarding the CC1101, there seem to be plenty of custom components floating around, plus an ESPHome PR used like this: bencoleabbott/cc1101-bridge.yaml
If you want to use the transmitter and receiver independently, you need some kind of protection against self interference. Smart RF transceiver chips handle this automatically in hardware using time division (TDM).
If you are continuously transmitting, yes. Or if you want to be sure you don’t miss single reception while transmitting. But in common cases here it’s not needed.
It’s more about it can’t happen at the same time. But yes, if you only use the receiver occasionally, for example for signal analysis, it will probably work fine.
In my case, though, I have a fairly large number of sensors at long distances that I listen to while also needing to send commands, and then passive transmitter and receiver units don’t work particularly well due to self interference.
Therefore, “smart” transceivers using TDM are a must in solutions such as ZWLR (HA ZWA 2), LoRaWAN, and similar RF-systems.
