Adding Smartwares RM175RF Smoke Alarms to NodeRed

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 double pack, so they are linked together using the 433MHz signal, so the one is triggered by the other being triggered, so you can hear it more easily, which is a cool idea.

They arrived, took 5 minutes to set up, and I saw that my debug output from the RFLink Input node was already showing the receipt of messages! Amazing.

"20;E5;RM174RF;ID=80ff83;SWITCH=01;CMD=ON;SMOKEALERT=ON;↵"


Right, how do I decode this? A few moments later, I realised I'd already written the parser node, which set up a NodeRed message property "smokealert", set to the value of the "=ON/OFF" part. Note that I haven't seen an OFF yet! It took only a few minutes to extend the parser outputs, selecting on "RM174RF", open a new flow, add some code to put a message in the message, link it all up and stick it into the Telegram sender. Moments later, the smoke alarm was telling my wife, currently in Basel (don't ask!), that a some alarm was sounding! Fortunately I'd already warned her, and she is used to getting odd messages from hubby testing stuff...


Smokewares RF175RF Smoke Alarms
Smokewares RM175RF smoke alarms

I love it when something works as easily as that! Doubtless I'll find some problem, like they are optical when I really need both optical and alpha-particle, but hey...

Now all I have to do is put on them on the relevant ceilings!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Replacing Coffee Machine Pump (Dualit Espressivo)

Image
My 5 year old Dualit Espressivo broke on Saturday - disaster!! I was in the throes of making a coffee when the pump stopped, so no steamed microfoamed milk... Off with the back, check of voltages etc., taking extreme care because 240V + H2O is a Bad Thing. I located what seemed to be the pump, and there were volts on the terminals. Hmm. It’s an Ulka EP5FM according to the label. Google... Many people offering to sell me one, but the guys at ulka-ceme.co.uk aka Scintilla Pumps are the UK distributors. They sell a whole range of this type of pump, and the documentation shows that the crucial points are voltage/power, pressure (15 bar) and duty cycle (2m on/1m off). I can buy one online but I call them... they’re about 15 miles away, and are happy to sell me a replacement. We reckon it’s worth a lunch trip, so bowl over and it’s only £16 direct, vs £19.60 mail order. Done. The expensive part was lunch - £50!! Planning to skip dinner though... New pump fitted - looks like the old
Read more

Multiple SHT30 sensors on a single I2C bus with Sonoff-Tasmota

Image
I have a hankering to measure the input and output temperatures of my condensing boiler, in order to determine if it's likely to be actually condensing at any time. I have lots of SHT30 sensors, which attach handily to NodeMCU units. However, running 2 separate rigs, one each for input and output, means that temperature measurements will not be synchronised, which doesn't account for the action of the boiler and its heat output rate of change. It appears that the SHT30 has two I2C addresses (0x44 and 0x45), which are available on the Wemos D1 knock-offs that I have. So I started out by modifying one to use a different bus from the standard one - this is easily done by bridging a link with solder. I then used 2 NodeMCUs running together to check that the newly addressed device is actually detected and works. It does. Pair of NodeMCU/SHT30 setups in action Close-up of SHT30 devices -RH(44) has soldered address link (circled) So, let's see what we can do, eh? I
Read more

NodeMCU + Tasmota code + SHT30

Image
That was cool. Let's try something a bit "easier" - a NodeMCU module, which is easy to connect and upload to, in conjunction with a new sensor, the SHT30 that does humidity and temperature over an I2C interface. This is prompted by this article , which doesn't really say how to do any of this... Obligatory not very illustrative pic - bits are labelled pretty much! Oh yeah, had to solder the header pins onto the SHT30 - piece of cake now :-p. Compiled the latest Tasmota code (using the ESP 2.4.0 API + libs, which significantly improves the WiFi performance) in the Arduino IDE, it's already uploaded while I've been writing this. Gosh. And that was probably a bit rash! Re-compiled and uploaded, now I've edited the user_config.h file to include my Wifi details and a few other useful things. I'm hoping the code uses mDNS, because that's really handy. Hmm, that didn't seem to work - using the Serial Monitor indicates it's still us
Read more