Remote Control Lights using a Raspberry Pi

Fri, 03 Oct 2014 21:45:13 +0000

I got fed up with using my Arduino to interface with hardware. It’s really easy to use and wire things up, but actually transferring data between it and a PC (and possibly a server of some sort) is pretty painful. It usually requires using serial communications and some data serialisation method. So I thought I’d use a Raspberry Pi for a change!

I already had a 433 MHz transmitter/receiver pair working with the Arduino. I was trying out both the lawrie/LightwaveRF and roberttidey/LightwaveRF libraries to get my ceiling light and wall plug lights switching on and off remotely and it was awesome. But again, the Arduino brought pain when interfacing with a server.

I plugged the 433 MHz transmitter into the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO’s, grabbed lawrie’s library, converted it to be Raspberry Pi friendly using wiringPi and created a simple C++ main function to spew out some messages every couple of seconds. This was really easy using wiringPi!

Then I created this video.

The system seemed to work great! But it now needed the ability to receive messages too, for some unknown reason. So I attempted to use lawrie’s library again but it really failed for reasons that I forget… So I switched to using roberttidey’s library for RX, made it Raspberry Pi friendly and it worked!

I uploaded the code to GitHub at jimjibone/LightwaveRF so feel free to clone, fork or whatever.

I would ideally prefer to switch to use entirely roberttidey’s library, converted to use the Raspberry Pi, but initial attempts failed when trying to get TX working. I have also recently used this library with the Spark Core and it works really well, so enabling the library to work on the Pi would be awesome.

Home Automation on James Reuss

Remote Control Lights using a Raspberry Pi