Not sure where to post this but this is as good a place as any.
I’ve been using OpenMQTTGateway for a few years now in combination with SRX/STX882. It works great and is very versatile.
A few weeks ago, my wife bought a new Mazda CX-5. What with the current situation, it hasn’t been driven much and a few days ago, I was finding it hard to open the doors with the key. Eventually the doors unlocked and I tried to start the engine and saw a message telling me to hold the key close to the start button.
I thought “You’ve got to be kidding, the key battery can’t be going flat this soon!” Tried the spare key - same result. OK, it’s a receiver problem.
We happened to be driving past the dealer so I called in and raised the issue with the Service Manager. Couldn’t manage to convince said person that I understand how “stuff works” and she kept insisting that it was the key batteries and wouldn’t accept that both batteries going flat at precisely the same time was a highly unlikely circumstance. She said “The keys work on radio waves, you know.” “Yes, I do know.” Walked out in frustration.
At this point. the door opened and the engine started first try and I started to wonder if the car battery voltage had been a bit down from not being driven. After a drive it was back to normal. I’ve read that the tech in that car can be a bit sensitive to that. Still, I wasn’t convinced.
Then my Mazda 3 started doing the same. It’s been a long time since I changed the key battery on that so I didn’t make any connection.
Then I noticed that the remote for my office fanlight was having trouble as well and finally the penny dropped. All of the “faulty” devices are operating (at least here in Australia) on or about 433.92 MHz and so are the STX882’s.
I recently promoted my ageing Windows PC to Debian and have been building a new HA instance on it. I switched over to it yesterday and turned off the old instance and suddenly all the cars and remotes started working again.
I had some code I had written in Appdaemon to “smarten” up the dumb RF fan controllers and I’ve never been happy with it and didn’t port it over to the new instance. Can’t help thinking that it suddenly went to lunch and started flooding the house with RF and was saturating the frontends of all the receivers. (I don’t remember the last time I rebooted the Appdaemon server or even restarted the appdaemon service.) The STX882 has a surprisingly long range so it’s not unreasonable that it was out-competing a (hopefully short range) car key fob.
Anyway, it’s been good fun. One day when I get bored, I’ll fire up the old instance and have a look on my SDR and see what’s happening on the 70cm spectrum. It probably won’t do it again… 