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Showing posts from February, 2023

Open Energy Monitor - homegrown emonPi Construction (part 3)

 This project has been parked for a bit while various other things happened. I've been working with the ESP8266 in its various guises for a while now, and it's a very impressive and flexible piece of kit, largely because of its WiFi (and Bluetooth on the ESP32) capability. This opens it up to being used in lots of instrumentation projects, especially coupled with the ease of using firmware like Tasmota , which enable using it with minimal coding. So rather than just pick up where I left off (which I really should!), I've been looking at implementing some of the emonPi functions in an ESP8266. In principle this should be possible, especially as the OEM people re apparently looking at such things as well - they've even got an add-on emonESP that uses one to link the original Arduino-based hardware to Wifi. I just tried compiling the emonPi/firmware/src code in the Arduino 2.0.3 IDE, which of course exploded. In order to get it just to compile, and bearing in mind I was pl

Adding Smartwares RM175RF Smoke Alarms to NodeRed

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I recently acquired a Ring house alarm system, and was looking for a means of including smoke alarms in the system. It appears that you can get ZWave-enabled smoke alarms in the US, which work with the US Ring systems, but because of a difference in the permitted radio frequency bands, they don't work in the UK and EU. Bum. And nobody seems to have done the same thing for any in this geography. However, my NodeRed is equipped with RFLink, the nifty NL-based 433MHz wireless system, which I already use to control some light switches and listen for the Friedland doorbell . The latter uses a Telegram interface and a bot to send a Telegram message when the bell rings, and has worked fine for a long time. I was reading through the latest RFLink supported devices list and realised it contains smoke alarms!! I patiently worked my way through the list until I found some that were available in the UK, handily from Amazon, so I didn't have to wait long. I bought Smartwares RM175RF in a do