RFX dying???

[James Sentman]

I spent some time re-installing all this software. I had done it before in the distant past but things were quite complex and also quite expensive and getting the stuff to work on the mac was a problem. Getting the stuff to work on the Mac is still a huge deal and i’m not entirely sure which thing I compiled was the right library it needed but it is all working now ;) They have come down a lot in price, but are still not cheap. I can definitely build a plugin for this device. And since it’s all supported on the raspberry pi as well I can do another remote source plugin for it as well which connects to as many raspberry pi’s as you wish for extending the range. The cost of one of these dongles and a cheap pi is still cheaper than an RFX was even when you could get them. 

The radio I’m playing with right now is still available for just over 50 bucks and I’ve got another cheaper one I ordered direct from China here to play with as well and I’m going to get one of those new tiny $20 ones. I’m not getting very good range with this right now at all, but it might be that my antenna is laying on the bed next to the laptop where I’m currently playing with this before going to bed ;) I’ll try to do a better setup tomorrow and see if it works a bit better. The ability to pepper the house with them and have them all feed into XTension will be a great way to increase range. Then using the multi-interface feature of XTension it won’t matter which one receives the signal most reliably it will just show up.

The software loads dozens of libraries, some of which I have installed through brew and some I compiled myself. In order to package this in a way that doesn’t require a degree in command line compilation it may take a while as I fiddle with the internal load paths of the various binaries so that it can find them all locally inside the plugin package and XTension. But when I get that sorted out there won’t be any external installs of software necessary. Or at least that will be the goal.



> On Apr 3, 2021, at 1:08 PM, Dave Fleck <dfleck at pacifier.com> wrote:
> 
> I’m curious what you're using for a receiver. I’ve used an RFM12 and an RFM69 to decode LaCrosse sensors, but I’m currently enamored with rtl_433 (docs. at https://triq.org/rtl_433/ <https://triq.org/rtl_433/>). It uses Software Defined Radio, so it can decode *anything* regardless of data rate or modulation and uses off-the-shelf hardware. The project can decode 175 different protocols. You can set it for any common frequency (315 MHz, 433 MHz, 868 MHz, 915 MHz) or can time slice between frequencies. And it seems to be an active project. I’ve been toying with writing a plugin for it.
> 

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




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