Whats the Best 433Mhz solution?

Hardware
1

Guys,

I have not done any 433Mhz - but my house has an older alarm system (here in Australia) where we have a lot of wireless sensors for doors and windows etc - i would like to try and scan and identify these (as our alarm system is no longer operational) - i would like to see if i can capture and decode what these sensors are sending to see if they are able to be reused.

Can anyone suggest the best/most flexible system (plus any sort of starter guide) for capturing, identifying and decoding 433MHz stuff ?

Craig

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2

I think a rflink is the best solution. A sonoff flashed with tasmota or openmqttgateway works, but is limited in the supported protocols.

And of course if you just need to decode and not send, you can use a RTL-SDR dongle

merbanan/rtl_433: Program to decode traffic from Devices that are broadcasting on 433.9 MHz like temperature sensors

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I am very happy with an RFXTRX433XL that I use with node red to put data it receives on MQTT topics.
Seems to be very reliable.

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Yep at this stage read only - will check it out thanks

Craig

5

This looks like a good solution - not cheap though - but probably worth it to solve the angst

thanks

Craig

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I’m quite happy with two “hacked” (hardware-modified) Sonoff RFBridges, one runs Espurna (16 switches) for super-easy integration and a nice Web UI, the other OpenMQTTGateway, to catch the “odd” signals.

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You don’t need MQTT, You can run 433 right off the pins on your PI. HA has a Raspberry Pi RF component.

Do a search on how to get etekcity outlets working with HA, there’s a few good ones out there. And they’ll give you enough all the info you need on 433.

The best solution is a nodeMCU with MQTT though. I say that because you can set up a few transmitters to cover the weak spots.

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Yep MQTT is my choice of protocol as i use Node Red extensively. WIll check out the search info you have provided - thanks

Craig

9

Yep i did some more reading overnight and looks like ESPurna was the first.

I might order one of these and see how it goes as well as trying some of the NodeMcu options - although i think the WAF factor would be higher with the Sonoff

Craig

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I’ve just started with the ESP8266 and Hass as well, but I find all these 433MHz projects I can’t work and indecipherable. All I want is to receive 433MHz and send whatever decimal values it gets to a single MQTT topic and let Node Red or Hass take over. But I can’t find something that simple. Everyone has to pre-decode everything and send like 50 profiles for 50 hardware devices into 50 MQTT topics.

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Yeah that was my original reading as well

From what i understand though - lets say you are using OpenMQTT - it will send everything on the MQTT channel from OpenMQTT - so you could just use a wildcard subscription to the OpenMQTT topic, grab it all and (i would do this in Node Red) - use a switch node (and/or a change node) to grab out the relevant topics and do what you want with this

Craig

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12

And here is an example flow in Node Red

https://docs.openmqttgateway.com/integrate/node_red.html

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If you need complete device managed from www I can suggest sonoff RF bridge + tasmota firmware.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DXixXbg2T4Ns&ved=2ahUKEwjcjv7VrMnqAhXCk4sKHbqHDP8QwqsBMAJ6BAgKEAM&usg=AOvVaw0WtAyRptPC-Hpu8Tadr-5C

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And it is compatible with Home Assistant

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I run Openmqttgateway on my sonoff RF bridges. But it all depends on what protocol your wireless sensors are using.

16

I vote for the Rfxcom RFXTRXe; it’s a bit expensive but has never failed in past years.

To be honest my suggestion would be to avoid 433 MHz at all due to 1-way communication/lack of feedback loop.

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A door/window sensor or PIR does not actually need a feedback loop. Nor are temperature/humidity sensors…

And it you have them already, you can as well use them.

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I like it to connect to my Maverick BBQ Thermometer :slight_smile:

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Likewise, never failed me. I only use 433 for temperature sensors, but the RFXcom kit has been excellent.

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I’m using ESP8266MQTTGateway but the issue I’m having is that most of the stuff I want to interface with is not supported. I have a few temperature sensors, PIR sensors, door/window sensors - none of them are supported.
I’ve wrote a decoder for the temperature sensors (nexus) but getting the pull request approved into pilight has been such a pain that I mostly gave up on it. I don’t intend going through that process again 4 times. Plus, I don’t have two of each for all sensors, so my decoding may be off.

I’m using the Wofea gateway to read the unsupported sensors but it requires a Chinese cloud-based app, which keeps my phone alive all the time. I could flash it with tasmota, but that would not solve anything.

My fallback solution would be rf_433, but it has a pretty bad sensitivity (due to my antenna) and seems a bit overkill.