My wife and I are in the process of having our new home built, and are prepping Home Assistant to hit the ground running. We’ve got it running on a Raspberry Pi (and on Win 10, but it looks like the Pi will be what goes “live.”)
The Raspberry Pi RF switch looks like a pretty easy and low-cost solution to integrate things like LED candles and LED RGB strips. How is the range with these? Our new home is concrete block construction, but the internal walls will be wood framed drywall. Will these do well over 20-50 feet through a couple of walls?
Also, how unique are the signals for the typical devices? If I bought two RF remote LED strips off of e-Bay are they both likely to respond to the same on/off command, or is a unique ID and pairing common for this equipment so that I can control them individually from Home Assistant.
I’ve had REALLY good range with the 433mhz. I have the Pi in my office on one side of the house and the furthest outlet I used was in the opposite corner of the house (running Halloween lights). Worked flawlessly. Has to be about 150 feet. The only issues I’ve had is I had to stagger commands to different outlets so they don’t stomp on each other. I stagger about 30 seconds between outlets. And no return status so it’s kind of a trust thing that the lights went on. They do but ha restarts and other things can show inconsistent statuses. But for each holiday lighting and eventual accent lighting, I think it’s solid.
I’ve had no overlapping codes in the 14 outlets I’ve.bought. Plus some of them were programmable as well. You can see the codes in my repo github/ccostan
I’m interested in expanding into. Heap led strips for Room accents. Please keep this thread up to date if you end up getting the solution going.
I found the range to be poor until I put an antenna on my transmitter. Now my HA runs in the basement and I can turn lights on and off on the second floor.
I haven’t gone around the entire house with HA being in the basement but I did try the remote in every corner of the house and it worked fine. I think my house is about 2200 sq feet and 2 stories to give you an idea.
Downside as ccostan said is there is no feedback to HA.
I’ve had greatly varying success with 433MHz transmitters. It depends the most whether you are in a house, or in a busy apartment complex. This greatly reflects on the range of the cheap transmitters you can get off ebay. If there’s a lot of noise (read Wi-Fis, Microwaves, what-not).
I’ve seen the cheap transmitters do reliably 10-15m through concrete, in a house with no neighbors close by and not do more than 3-4 m with direct line of sight when there are 20+ Wi-Fi access points detected on my laptop.
As mentioned by silvrr the lack of feedback is also a major downside for me.
I should have mentioned that I did tie a small wire to the antennae port as well. Nothing fancy. Literally just one of the wires from a breadboard kit poked through the hole, curled up for contact and draped outside the Pi box.
I figured I’d add an antenna. I expect there’s an optimum antenna length based on the frequency. I’ll hit up some of the radio techs at work on that one.