I was futzing around last night repurposing some Raspberry Pis (bought before they were $180 apiece due to chip shortage) in my network rack. I took one of the RPis and installed RTL_433, node red, and plugged an RTL-SDR dongle into it along with a small antenna. I am going to use node red to push data to an MQTT service for use with my weather data extraction setup. I mostly wanted to see if I could pick up an Accurite Temperature sensor (606TX) on my balcony at 433.925 MHz. What I wasn’t expecting was picking up a couple other temperature sensors, one Accurite and one Oregon Scientific models.
I live in a retirement community and for the most part the residents are not really that tech-savvy, or computer-savvy for that matter. So I wouldn’t expect them to have a lot of weather station gear. My 606TX only gives back temperature on the balcony, but I noticed that it was reading a temperature about 2 degrees C higher than the Oregon Scientific model. The Oregon Scientific model also gave back humidity. I am thinking of gathering data from each of the other models to extract trends. My balcony faces north and that might be the cause of the temperature difference in the summer time.
I haven’t played with the gain of the dongle or looked into other frequencies yet. I am pretty sure that my Tempest, also on my balcony, transmits on the 915 MHz band, but I have not been able to capture it’s data set yet with the dongle.
This is a blog mostly about techie things, what I am doing to my apartment network on the cheap, IOT, 3D Printing, Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, ESP32, ESP8266, Home Automation, Personal Weather Stations, Things That Go Bump in the Night, and some side issues that need discussing. Remember, sometimes the journey to an end is as much fun as the goal achieved!
