Background:
Have a container (an actual physical one, in aluminium) with electrical devices in it that I want to measure and control. Heat and humidity within the container, and a freezer with a lot of meat.
The container I suspect act as a faradays cage. Cant get reception for z-wave or zigbee in it.
Question:
Does a solution for this exist? I have searched in vain, maybe my search skill lacks me.
Protocol dont really matter, but my first choice would be z-wave
Have tested:
One z-wave device close to the container on the outside so that they are really close, but no luck. If I open the door it works.
My initial thoughts, but open for any input:
A zigbee/z-wave extender with an external antenna, preferably two, that I can drill a hole for. And then have one antenna inside and one outside
Another Home Assistant that I place within the steel-container and connect with an ethernet cable. Run the ethernet-cable outside and connect to a weather resistant wifi bridge. And then set up as a proxy for my main one. Clunky solution, but could potentially work
RF signals will not penetrate a faraday cage.
You need to get the signal in with a cable and then have an antenna inside to transmit and receive the RF signals.
But if you are pulling cables inside the container, then a cabled sensor array might actually be better.
If you have power inside the container, then you can also use ethernet-over-power adapters to get the signal somewhere closer to you HA.
I would choose a ethernet-over-power and then set up an infrastructure inside the container.
It could be Zigbee, RF, ZWave, WiFi or cabled, since you just need a gateway/hub/access point to bridge from the RF signals to the cabled signals.
Ethernet-over-power is such a common product today, so there are many good options.
The ones with high bandwidth are pretty expensive, but for your task a 100mbit/s would probably do fine and those are cheap.
Take maybe a look at the options from TPLink. Its a wellknown old brand and they offer a decent update support on their products, so you know that error have a chance of getting fixed with firmware updates.
How big is the container?
I wasn’t sure if meant an actual shipping container.
I would just put a wired temp/humidity sensor through the wall. Although then you need to figure out what is going to read the sensor and how to weatherproof it…
yeah.
The idea with the ethernet-over-power was that you could build out your IoT network to inside the contain through that, like adding an extra AP or use wired devices or add hubs needed, like wired RF hubs, wired zigbee hubs and so on.
You need to get the signal out of it and that is what the ethernet-over-power provides.
Thanks. Like the idea, but for me, overkill.
Dream scenario is still some sort of repeater of zigbee or zwave signal so that I could have inside be treated as reachable
A bit more specifics on use-case. Probably should have included this in the first post.
Have a small house. With not enough storage.
For storage have added a shipping container in aluminium to help with “storage”.
In there I store all the “not so much used stuff”, everything from pantry-stuff to seasonal type clothes.
More importantly aI have a freezer where I store a fair amount of meat.
In the container I have a dehumidifier to keep mold out.
So the two things I am mostly interested in is:
Temperature in the freezer with alarm if out of range.
And humidity in the container itself. Make sure the dehumidifer does what it is supposed to.
I think Jon was doing something along those lines wifi/zigbee router although he wasn’t designing it around splitting through a wall. Not sure what he ended doing with it…
You could have the zigbee side inside and wifi side outside with a cable connection between the two halves. Although I can’t find his thing atm.
It sounds like overkill, but they can be pretty cheap too.
A TPLink TL-WPA4220KIT should not be that expensive and with that kit you get ethernet-over-power and one of the ends even have an access point built in.