I recently bought a house with 10 shutters equipped with Altron RadioBlack motors controlled via EasyWave. Of course, I want to control these shutters using my Homey Pro. However, browsing this forum, the only way to do that seems to be by using a Raspberry Pi connected to an Eldat RX09 USB stick which is no longer available.
So, now I’m wondering whether it would be possible to control these shutters directly from the Homey Pro. The 868 MHz configuration looks promising:
Attribute
Value
Carrier frequency
868300000Hz
Channel spacing
325000Hz
BaudRate
12004Bd
Modulation
ASK
It might be possible to generate the appropriate signals directly from the Homey Pro using the Signals from the Homey Apps SDK. However, I cannot find a specification of the EasyWave protocol. All I know is that it also uses the 868,3 MHz frequency so at least that is a match. However, without an EasyWave specification I don’t know about the other attributes. Anybody else lucky in finding the EasyWave specification?
I’ve already tried to record the signal from the manual Altron receiver with the Homey Developers Tools, but the transmitted signal wasn’t even noticed by the Homey Pro. That might be a bad sign I guess.
Can anybody make a statement whether this is a route to further pursue or not? I.e., do I even stand a chance to get this working?
Sorry, I did not say it is existing, but I meaned to use this as an example to create a “tranlator” for his purpose, the device, Andreas is using, can also be bought in a 868 MHz version. Sure some code will probably have to be rewritten and the protocol implemented.
That’s what I’m trying to say: if the protocol was known, someone very likely would have already implemented it for home automation purposes. But all I can find about it is that people are trying to find the Eldat RX09 USB stick to make it work.
Turns out that EasyWave is a proprietary, closed, protocol (that’s why there’s no documentation whatsoever on the internet), so I no longer expect to be able to control it from the Homey directly.
Luckily, after contacting Eldat, I think I found a company that can provide me with a RX09E5026-02-01K USB stick. Then I can try the Rfxcom.2 solution available in Homey. I’ll give it a try.
In the meantime I managed to get a hold on an RX09 USB stick as mentioned above. I’m also able to control the shutters via a terminal program on my laptop. Hooray!
Next step is of course to control the shutters from Homey. I’m considering to put the USB stick in my Windows based HTPC (so there’s no need for a Raspberry Pi) and then use Rfxcom.2 by Jilles Miedema as a device in Homey. To send the text commands from Homey to the USB stick would require a solution like Serial2Net, which is basically a gateway from the Rfxcom.2 app to the RX09 USB stick, via LAN. However, that’s written in JavaScript for a Raspberry Pi and I need to see if I can get that to run on the Windows HTPC. Alternatively, I can write a similar tool in e.g. Python.
My solution is based on MQTT and consists of 3 parts:
A very simple Python script, running on my Windows based HTPC, that simply forwards strings received from the MQTT broker to the USB transceiver stuck in the PC.
A Mosquito MQTT broker running on the same HTPC.
A very simple window covering app, using the existing MQTT Client app, running on Homey, that sends strings to the MQTT broker.
After adding the appropriate devices, I now can control the shutters manually via buttons, or programmatically via flows. Nice. Note that I manually (using a terminal program) registered the transceiver with the shutters first.
