RaspBox - Home Automation & Cloud

I moved to Norway and didn't bring my remote controlled plugs with me so right now I'm using my Raspberry Pi as a XMPP server. I may move my XMPP server to another server (Fit-PC, already used for an Asterisk server) and use the Raspberry Pi on another project.

Thank you everyone for having followed my project. There wasn't a lot of updates lastly but I hope you enjoyed it anyway.

Just a small project log to say that I've installed a Pi Supply on my Raspberry Pi in order to bring ATX-style power supply to it. 

The Pi Supply website gives a script to run on the Raspberry Pi to detect a button press from the Pi Supply and halt safely. Since I'm using Arch Linux with no X and the Pi Supply script is made to be run on an LXDE environment, I though I should make my own script and systemd service.

You can find it on my GitHub. If you wish to install it on your system, you should do:

# git clone https://github.com/rodolpheh/softshut-pi.git
# make install

If you want to remove it, you can do:

# make remove

If you want to start the service on boot, do:

# systemctl enable softshut

After rebooting you should be able to shutdown safely your Raspberry Pi just by pressing the soft shutdown button on the Pi Supply.

Note: you need python2 and python2-raspberry-gpio to run this script. You can find the last one in the AUR (only for Arch Linux users).

N.B: I've also installed a Pololu U3V12F12 to get 12V for the TX433. For the moment, I can't tell if it's better since I'm more working on my Sci-Fi contest project than on my RaspBox but I will get you informed soon.

Before making my final "Raspberry Shield", I want to experiment with the 433Mhz transmitter and maybe try some experiment with a 433Mhz receiver so I made some sort of "µShield" that will be plugged later on the "Raspberry Shield".

The µShield, ready to use !

This µShield include the transmitter (TX433N), the receiver (RX433N) and 2 SMA connectors for antenas. It has two pins : one for 5V, one for ground, one input for the transmitter and one output for the receiver.

The size of the track connecting the antenas pins from the transmitter and receiver should be a 50 Ohm track. After using some tools on the Internet, I came up with a 2.81mm track.

It also include connectors for a 5V -> 12V DC/DC converter if I want to upgrade the power of the transmitter. Because of this converter (EC1TA02N), I did two separate ground planes. These are connected when not using the DC/DC converter (but I need to add jumpers).

It took one day to design the µShield with Eagle and produce it with my 3020T-DJ CNC. Some mistakes have been done due to a wrong size of engraving bit. I'm using a one-face 0.8mm wide PCB and produce 2 pieces to make a two-faces 1.6mm wide PCB after soldering.

Engraving, drilling and milling with CNC

To get Gcode from my design, I used pcbgcode on Eagle but I had to modify some parts because pcbgcode think that component traces are dimensions and then make the borders thicker. I also cut two pins of the SMA plug because they were too close to the antena's track.

The last design uses a 0.6mm engraving bit (which I find big).

The final µShield had a ground problem (the ground between the two faces weren't connected) so I had to do it myself by soldering the ground plane to the SMA plug (the SMA plug go through the board and is soldered on the ground plane of the other face)

Patching the unconnected ground planes

After making my µShield, all I needed to do is plug it into a breadboard, plug my Pi Cobbler to the breadboard and add some wires. I've added leds on input and output in order to see if signal is received and transmitted by the Raspberry. After plugging my antena on the receiver, It was time to give it a try !

µShield on breadboard connected to the Pi Cobbler

Using yana-server, I was able to control automatic plugs in a range of 20m. I used my SDR dongle in order to measure the signal's frequency and found 433.94Mhz exactly (for a transmitter that output at 433.92Mhz). Not bad ! Better than the remote that is shipped with my automatic plugs that claims 433.92Mhz but output 433.84Mhz

Watching the signal with GQRX

I hope I don't forget anything. Next time I will publish fixed Eagle files and the library I created for the RX433N and the TX433N. Keep tuned, more is coming !