01.18
I have finished documenting/cleaning the code for my Jaycar el-cheapo “Thermor/BIOS” branded wireless weather station receiver. The basis for the code comes from the Practical Arduino weather station receiver project.
In the end all it took was a week of analysing the RF signal from the weather station using my soundcard and wasting countless hours decoding the packets! And a little determination.
Receiving the signal is pretty straight forward – an RF receiver is connected to pin 8 of the arduino via a 1k resistor, and an LED via a 330ohm resistor to pin 6. See the Practical Arduino schematic for more info – it is essentially the same circuit, just minus the LED on pin 7.
You can also take a look at the ThermorWeatherRx Protoshield I soldered up after the recent SparkFun freeday.
I have uploaded the sketch to github: http://github.com/kayno/ThermorWeatherRx for anyone else to try. There is a small to-do list for me to complete, but that can happen later.
“In the end all it took was a week of analysing the RF signal from the weather station using my soundcard and wasting countless hours decoding the packets! And a little determination.”
Can you post more on your tools and process for decoding the packets? There is a weather station (temperature only) on my bench that is resisting me. I’m interested in hearing about your toolset.
@Mike
Take a look at http://davehouston.net/learn.htm – it has a schematic that uses an RF receiver (eg sparkfun or jaycar) and two resistors as a voltage divider to connect to the line in on a soundcard.
When its connected you will hear static coming through the line in, and whenever data comes in it will make a *beeeep* sound (at least it did for me). I used audacity to record this beep, and by zooming in on the sound waves i could see the following pattern: http://twitpic.com/wmblf.
From there its a matter of working out what those pulses mean – some are long, some are short in width, which indicate 1s and 0s. See this example of this, but you will need to determine the ‘pattern’ of your device – capture the packet, record what is on the display of your weather station, and determine how they correlate.
Once you know the correlation, an arduino can be used to capture, decode and output the temperature!
i am happy to look at the packets you capture and help decode :)
“In the end all it took was a week of analysing the RF signal from the weather station using my soundcard and wasting countless hours decoding the packets! And a little determination.”
Can you post more on your tools and process for decoding the packets? There is a weather station (temperature only) on my bench that is resisting me. I’m interested in hearing about your toolset.
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