Domoticz on the B3
Posted: 21 Aug 2013, 07:37
Loving the idea of this home automation, but I found that the Tellstick is somewhat hard to acquire. Browsing the web I also ran into some articles that named this device troublesome and obviously I want it to be compatible with the remote control devices I already have. Also it is just a transmitter and I was thinking you could do a lot more if you could also grab signals that are sent from other devices, such as weather stations.
Apparently the best thing out on the market today is the RFXtrx433 transceiver from Rfxcom. It already supports a long list of devices and you can flash the firmware whenever updates become available to support even more devices. At just under €100,- pricing is also reasonable.
Looking for Linux based or compatible home automation software that utilize the RFXtrx433 I stumbled upon the Domoticz project. While not explicitly meant to run on Pi, they do offer a binary download and even a complete configured OS image for this (ARM driven) device. Shamefully the binary they offer does not run on the B3 though, not even after I checked dependencies and added the missing libcurl.so.4. Installing from source was the only option.
At first I couldn't get the software to find my RFXtrx433 and I started worrying that this might be caused by the bad support for the FTDI serial to USB chip in squeeze. Luckily this proved easy to solve by simply installing libftdi1 and it instantly registered the buttons on my remote - fab
If anyone else is interested in this project, you don't have to compile it yourself. I've packaged the resulting file and added this to my repository. It will also pull in the other required packages, so no worrying about that as well. All you need is an RFXtrx433 and/or other supported sensors and you're ready to go.
Apparently the best thing out on the market today is the RFXtrx433 transceiver from Rfxcom. It already supports a long list of devices and you can flash the firmware whenever updates become available to support even more devices. At just under €100,- pricing is also reasonable.
Looking for Linux based or compatible home automation software that utilize the RFXtrx433 I stumbled upon the Domoticz project. While not explicitly meant to run on Pi, they do offer a binary download and even a complete configured OS image for this (ARM driven) device. Shamefully the binary they offer does not run on the B3 though, not even after I checked dependencies and added the missing libcurl.so.4. Installing from source was the only option.
At first I couldn't get the software to find my RFXtrx433 and I started worrying that this might be caused by the bad support for the FTDI serial to USB chip in squeeze. Luckily this proved easy to solve by simply installing libftdi1 and it instantly registered the buttons on my remote - fab
If anyone else is interested in this project, you don't have to compile it yourself. I've packaged the resulting file and added this to my repository. It will also pull in the other required packages, so no worrying about that as well. All you need is an RFXtrx433 and/or other supported sensors and you're ready to go.