Working simple wireless comms to homey from embedded device?

leo7893

Hello all,

I'm wondering if anyone has a working way of communicating from a home made battery powered embedded device to the homey? I was thinking of something along the line of the Nordic nRF24L01 (not supported I know). Wifi, Bluetooth, Xeebee etc all seem a bit of overkill. It's only required for short distances & very infrequent use.

It would be great if someone had come up with a working method rather than having to trying develop something with the RF learning modes on the homey & develop an app.

Many thanks,

Leo

robertklep

From what I'm reading, the Nordic nRF24L01 RF protocol is similar to BLE (but not the same). It also uses 2.4Ghz, same as BLE.

However, for the Nordic chip you require a compatible receiver, which Homey isn't. Homey does have BLE support (although I'm not sure what the current status is, last time I tried using it, it made my Homey quite unstable).

For short distances and very infrequent use, it might be worthwhile to look at the ESP8266 chip. Granted, it's WiFi, so not very energy efficient, but with infrequent use you can put the device into deep sleep mode in which it will only use microamps (esp if you desolder any onboard LED's).

Depending on what you want to communicate, there are plenty of libraries which you can use to gather and format your data. If the device is used to run sensors, MySensors is a nice one (with a pretty decent Homey app to communicate with it).

Plattis

Have you checked MySensors https://apps.athom.com/app/org.mysensors.homey ?
I have a lot of MySensor nodes working with Vera. They are cheap and easy to work with.
Thinking of trying Homey as a next automation hub, or actually pretty sure I'll order one.