Hi there,
as im waiting for the parts to arrive i want to prepare and setup my home assistant.
I want HomeAssistant to be on server PC that will be in my basement, but i wonder if i can use my Raspberry Pi 3 B+ as repeater/relay for Zigbee and RTLSDR dongle that will be on the upper floor so my devices can have better signal.
Im new with HomeAssistant but i have worked with openHub in the past.
Any advice will be highly appreciated.
Thanks
For Zigbee (almost) any mains powered Zigbee device will extend the mesh. Just buy a few of those and position them appropriately.
Thanks for the suggestion, but i really want to use the raspberry next to my tv, because that is the center point of my house and as i said my pc will be deep in the basement so i will not get signal up from my usb zigbee and usb rtlsdr device if they are connected on my server, because of dense stone walls.
So is there possibility to install the usb zigbee and rtlsdr on the raspberry and send those signals to my main server?
Well, for Zigbee you can run Zigbee2MQTT there, that bit is easy.
For the RTL SDR, depends on what you want it for, there’s various pieces of software that’ll bridge one of those to MQTT where you’re looking to use it with RF433 devices.
Yea thats it mqtt and then send it to the server.
RTLSDR for now will be for my weather station that works on 868MHz, one question though, can i use the RTLSDR to pick up let say 433MHz and 868MHz in the same time?
Keep in mind those bands are far apart. The SDR dongle will have to hop frequencies. That could cause it to miss packets. That should not be an issues if it’s just weather related sensors because they repeat frequently. If on the other hand you also want to add sensors like window or door it may be unreliable. In that case you can use two SDR dongles. I also recommend you purchase a USB extension cable to separate the Zigbee dongle from the PI3 if you will be using WiFi on the PI. That will decrease noise and increase reliability. The USB extensions are also often useful because many SDR and ZigBee dongles are too big to fit in the USB ports next to each other.
Side note: I used an adapter on my SDR to attach it to my TV antenna. I’m sure that isn’t necessary but it boosted the range so far I even picked up neighboring weather stations.
