Hi There
I am wanting to look at using the open energy monitor system but want to upgrade all wireless communications to the new RFM69 / Moteino environment
Please refer to information on http://openenergymonitor.org/emon/ website
I am looking for advice on what would be needed to upgrade / alter the following primary components of the open energy monitor system.
The wireless transmitter
http://openenergymonitor.org/emon/modules/emonTxV3
or
http://openenergymonitor.org/emon/emontxshield/smt
The Base Station
http://openenergymonitor.org/emon/emonbase/raspberrypi
I look forward to response and advice
Greg
Greg,
As far as the base station you can use a setup like this: http://lowpowerlab.com/blog/2015/01/22/making-a-custom-raspberrypi-case/
All you need is some wires between your Pi and Moteino. The ATXRaspi and shutdown button is not even necessary, although nice to have in a standalone project. If you can lasercut somewhere then you can make that nice case also.
For the transmitter I think you can use RFM69CW which is a drop in replacement for RFM12B, not really sure how well they support the RFM69 though, but I think they have code for it. The Moteino is directly compatible with their stuff since both use atmega328p MCUs so you just program the Moteino the same way (with their sketch).
Hi Greg,
The RFM69CW is indeed a drop in replacement for the RFM12B, it works great on the emonTx V3.4, emonTx V2, emonGLCD and RFM12pi. However there is an issue with the firmware on the emonTx V3.2 and emonTH V1.4. These units use a Ciseco RFu328 modules which has both the ATmega328 and RFM module on a little board see photo: http://wiki.openenergymonitor.org/images/EmonTx_V3_SMA.jpg
The RFu328 has got different INT and SEL pin to the standard JeeLib setup for the RFM module. To get round this we crearted a fork of the RF12 JeeLib driver for the RFM12B on the RFu328: https://github.com/openenergymonitor/RFu_jeelib/. This fork has not been updated for the RFM69CW. I'm certain it's technically possible, however I'm not sure it's worth the effort since these units are no longer in manufacture and de-soldering the RFM12B to change to RFM69CW is not easy without causing damage. The new emonTx V3.4 and emonTH V1.5 both have the ATmega328 and RFM module directly on the board using standard JeeLib connections there therefore work out of the box with the standard JeeLib, hooray for standardisation! http://openenergymonitor.blogspot.com/2014/12/introducing-emontx-v34.html
Welcome Glyn,
Thanks for filling in for my lack of details, very nice hardware features on your new emonTX 3.4!
I am a little confused about compatibility - if I already have a network that's based on RFM12B, is there a way to add new RFM69 nodes using standard drivers? I am using openenergymonitor.org hardware and Moteinos together in the same network.
The OpenEnergyMonitor project uses Jeelib drivers which allow this possibility, I believe that comes as a tradeoff between compatibility and lesser features that RFM69 offers since RFM12B is a much more limited radio (no hardware AES encryption etc).
Please check their website for more details on that. I chose to focus more on RFM69 only going forward, but all Moteinos still accept RFM12B pinout layout in addition to RFM69, so they will accept RFM12B and all RFM69 types.