Hi, is anyone here using GitHub - chester4444/esp-multical21: ESP8266/ESP32 decrypts wireless MBus frames from a Multical21 water meter to read their kamstrup multical21 water meter? I’m trying to get it to work, and I’m struggling with the build quality of the CC1101 boards I ordered. Unfortunately I’m setting this up while not being close to the actual water meter yet (preparing it at home before I visit my parents who have the water meter), so I cannot with full certainty say if it technically works or not.
My problem: the serial logs show me that the esp8266 successfully connects to the wifi, and that it does recognize the cc1101 (after 2 tries with faulty modules where it couldnt reach the cc1001), but now the only feedback i get afterwards is a kind-of-random hex value every few seconds, without a line break or anything.
Did anyone else get this setup to work and maybe was in the same situation at a point in time? I’d like to avoid only finding out on short notice that I actually still need to order yet another spare part…
I didnt use the esphome component at all, and also in the end didnt get the AES key from my watercompany
I did get espmultical deployed and running, it found the watermeter and extracted data, but without the code the delivered values for liters, temperature etc are nonesense.
I did play around with the infrared interface, using the pykamstrup python script i found on github, but to turn that into a permanent solution i would have to add something that once a day activates the magnet switch and reads the data.
Long story short: i for now kind of gave up on the topic, but I’m planning to write a longer post about all my findings, to at least document everything that i found in various different github repos and online discussions.
please how should i do it try? any instructions, link to it
I tried esp32 with cc1101, some communication is going on, but I can’t decode anything, this is repeated in the log
[23:19:21][V][rxLoop:167]: Have 40 bytes from CC1101 Rx, RSSI: -38 dBm LQI: 128
[23:19:21][D][mbus:023]: Processing C1 B frame
[23:19:21][V][mbus:027]: Frame: 25442D2C216735241B168D2020B2EE69D326B63131641B0D58D72A17C50E2EE9DFA379B897F1 (38) [with CRC]
[23:19:21][V][mbus:165]: Validating CRC for Block1 + Block2
[23:19:21][D][crc:035]: calculated: 0x3E60, read: 0x97F1 !!!
I’m confused. esp-multical21 isn’t esphome software, it’s a standalone solution that reads the radio packages, decrypts them, and then pushes the datafields to an mqtt broker. So the chain would look something like this:
watermeter => esp running esp-multical21 => mqtt broker => home assistant mqtt sensor
Do you already have a mqtt broker running on your HA instance? You can install the mosquitto addon directly via HA.
mqtt is still unknown to me, I guess I’m misunderstanding it. However, we still tried the procedure according to
and now the water meter is communicating and I can see the correct data in mqtt explorer
watermeter0
online = True
ipaddr = 192.168.1.53
sensor
mydata = 99.892
mydatajson = {“CurrentValue”: 99.892,“MonthStartValue”: 98.346,“WaterTemp”: 13,“RoomTemp”: 14}
but I can’t see it in HA, I’m doing something wrong
Okay, then I’d recomment first getting a grip of what MQTT is and how it works. It’s an overall very helpful concept/tool/tech, not just for this project, so you’ll profit from it
I’m not sure what the very best source for a start is at the moment, but from a quick googling this here looks okay, depending on how “overall techy” you are: Introduction to MQTT - SparkFun Learn
Once you grasped the overall concept, I think things will start to make sense around this project way easier and faster
