Somewhat OT - Split RTL_433 data

[radio...@gmail.com]

Here’s a question (and a bit of background, I’m an “old school” guy, and redundant ANYTHING makes me less than happy).

 

I have a  bunch of “things”, mostly around Home Automation, that emit 433Mhz signals with data that I’d like to capture (the immediate things are Accurite Sensors for our two freezers and scattered around the house, but some other things include a garage door opener and some motion sensors).  These things aren’t really weather related, but, I WOULD like to be able to grab the data and use it in my Home Automation system.  I could, and currently have) add at least the temp sensors to weewx and then write queries to get the data out of weewx, but then redundancies (data in two places, extra code) start to set in.

 

I could also set up a second SDR and a second Pi and a second copy of RTL_433, but there are those damn redundancies again 😊.

 

So – has anyone else run into this problem and maybe found an “elegant” solution?  Or, perhaps not-so-elegant?   I suppose I could hack rtl_433 and conditionally direct SOME of the traffic to “someplace else”; but that seems kinda “brute force”.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Clay Jackson

cl...@n7qnm.net

radio...@gmail.com

 

 

[Vince Skahan]

On Tuesday, May 19, 2020 at 4:35:41 PM UTC-7, cl...@n7qnm.net wrote:

So – has anyone else run into this problem and maybe found an “elegant” solution?  Or, perhaps not-so-elegant?   I suppose I could hack rtl_433 and conditionally direct SOME of the traffic to “someplace else”; but that seems kinda “brute force”.

 

There have been lots of threads about the various weewx intake (and export) methods.  Folks tend to lean toward MQTT typically when integrating a bunch of differing things. 

[Xant]

Clay

I parallel with you, as also have "bunch of things" house around, and never able to figured how to consolidate. Maybe something external as IFTTT to play the "middleman"...

I will be curious if any further "consolidation" ideas...

[Greg Troxel]

I was going to say the same thing.

MQTT is just a message bus. But it is generally reliable, and pretty
much everything these days supports it. Regardless of how you choose to
store and process data, it's a reasonable choice for getting data from
generators to processing systems.

In my case, I have a weewx setup and also Home Assistant. I am running
mosquitto as the broker.

Weewx is running normally with a Davis station. It also has the mqtt
extension and I publish archive records (every 5 minutes) to MQTT. In
my case I am not using MQTTSubscribe, but if I had more sensors that I
wanted weewx to process I would do it that way.

I have a few sensors that post to mqtt, mainly built with
ESP8266/NodeMCU. These are for indoor temp/humidity, and voltage on an
small off-grid solar/battery system, and a few other monitoring type
things.

I should set up the rtl_433 bridge as well, to pick up an Acurite 6045M
lightning detector. Perhaps I'd put lightning into weewx. (I'm still
experimenting with rtl_433 and don't yet have it "in production".)

In Home Assistant, I of course have mqtt configured, to read the indoor
sensors. I'm not interested in years of trends -- this is mostly about
notifying me if things go out of bounds, and me knowing if the heat has
been running. So I have not tried to put this data into e.g extraTemp1
in weewx, but I could. In addition I ingest basic weather data from
what weewx posts, for display and to enable automations.


I don't follow your notion that sending data multiple places as "brute
force", but if you mean hardcoding a switching plan into rtl_433 just
for you being icky, I see your point. Using mqtt, and having various of
your systems subscribe as needed is a good solution. If you are doing
weewx and HA, I think you'll find that you want to add one of them to HA
that you didn't originally, and it's easy to just add an mqtt sensor to
the config.

[cl...@n7qnm.net]

Thanks, guys!

I was toying with the idea of setting up a second Pi/SDR and just grabbing the data "off the air"; but, I think MQTT is probably a better choice.

Clay

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "weewx-development" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to weewx-developm...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/weewx-development/rmiftbtr20g.fsf%40s1.lexort.com.

[Vince Skahan]

Just run your broker 'on' the pi and you'll be set.

FWIW, it tends to be more reliable if it's a wired pi in my experience, but it works fine either way.