So many questions :-[ I hope they haven't been asked to death. (if there is a FAQ please point me that way)
First an introduction. I work in technology and have been using all different flavors of *nix since the early 90's. I've deployed bunches of Raspberry PIs because those things are awesome. And in the past year, I've discovered the arduino and have built a number of projects using them. My significant other wants a home security system and googling got me to this site. It ticks all the boxes, open source, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, DIY, and a number of pre-baked kits. Now my questions:
- What protocol is used for communication?
- If I knew the protocol I could google this answer, but is anybody else using it?
- Does or are there plans to allow the Raspberry PI to interface with different protocols? I know z-wave is closed, but there are zigbee products on the market that would be nice to purchase
- Are their other IoT gateways that use your protocol?
- There are 6 different transceivers for the Motenio. How does one go about choosing? I'm assuming that all transceivers need to be the same.
That's enough for now. BTW - good job. The Motenio concept gets me excited for all its possibilities.
Hi JSI,
RE protocol - it's a very broad question but I think the answer is - there really isn't one.
The RF is based on RFM69 (the silicon chip is the Semtech SX1231h) FSK radios. If you use my RFM69 library that just sets up FSK communication at whatever frequency you want and sends out optionally encrypted packets. The receiver is configured to listen at the same settings. The packets are passed as ASCII text (the actual payload, before encryption) and gets passed to the receiver through serial (after reception and decryption). Then you do whatever you want with the payloads.
See the "IoT Gateway" concept which some people have started using: lowpowerlab.com/gateway
I built a bunch of hardware to make all this easy to integrate, you will see Moteino and MightyHat and ATXRaspi and MightyBoost and other stuff, but really you don't need anything more than just a Moteino at your Pi side, and an end node Moteino to start setting up a link and report some data which you then interpret in whatever way, or you could try the gateway software I built.
Compatibility? Not much, in terms of the RF portion. But other than that I think there's a lot of commonality and depending how you may use other hardware it could all go into your gateway software of choice.
All of this is very very DIY oriented, steep learning curve if you start from scratch. If you just want plug and play, you're probably better off trying your big box store products with their usual forever cloud dependent service and microphone/camera for surveying your every move.