So I’ve been hunting around for a decent system to build out some initial “smart home” type projects, focusing to start with on temperature, humidity and pressure.
As part of the excessive digging through google and testing out my ability to keep changing search parameters until something good pops up I came across the range of radio sensors from Ciseco (http://www.wirelessthings.net/) which merrily plug into the RPi and an Instructable which at least pointed in the right direction while missing some of the key steps which aren’t entirely clear from the product docs.
Setup
First things first, install the hat onto your RPi of choice, I’ve installed on a RPi B+, but the forum indicates that it should work just as well on a RPi 2. The hat isn’t stackable so the RPi 2 might be better in the long term by keeping access to some of the GPIO pins.
Pop the lid off the sensor, you’ll need access to the configure button later on.
You must either install the LaunchPad application on the RPi and be able to run an X based display either locally on the RPi or exported back to your working system of choice (I’m using on a Win7 machine running Xming). This is needed to setup the sensor which arrives in a deep sleep and no hint as to what the device ID is.
Disable the serial console from the raspi-config application, or go through the manual steps to remove /dev/ttyAMA0 from /etc/inittab and /boot/cmdline, reboot as necessary. Failure to do this blocks the ability to actually access the radio device.
Follow the LaunchPad documentation (PDF Doc from github), first setting up the encryption key for the radio device (I’m using the Slice of Radio for the RPi). Then run the LaunchPad and follow the instructions for getting the Message Bridge running and setting up the sensor for the first time.
For inital testing purposes I’d recommend setting the reporting interval at 10 seconds so you’re not spending the entire evening waiting for the next poll.
Providing that everything has gone well, you’ve worked out the permission problem on /dev/ttyAMA0 (or are running with root privs) you should be seeing something like the following in minicom
aAATEMP019.0
aAAAWAKE----
aAABATT3.15-
aAASLEEPING-
aAATEMP019.1
The Message Bridge appears to be there to provide a pretty interface into the serial port, however if all you intend to do is listen for information landing on the serial port I would ditch it and just run a script in your language of choice and parse the data as it comes in.
To come
I need to add in some more monitors, work out the range on the sensor and position the monitorPi appropriately in the house, then some graphing to make it actually useful.
I’ll post the script I’m using later.
Links and other useful stuff
Language of things : https://www.wirelessthings.net/language-of-things
LaunchPad : https://www.wirelessthings.net/launchpad
Alternate Instructable