This repository documents my work of reverse engineering an RF transmitter so I can control the receivers with a transmitter I build myself.
Let's see if I can capture data from the above transmitter using an off-the-shelf RF receiver:
Below depicts the simple setup you need to capture a 433 MHz signal using an oscilloscope and the above RF receiver:
Below follows one example of a captured button press:
After saving the data as CSV I used Jupyter Notebook to parse and manipulate it. First let's compare the above screenshot with my Matplotlib plot:
Now let's get rid of that noise:
Next step is to convert this stream of highs and lows to something meaningful. I'm ready to capture all button presses and decode the bytes.
Please see the helloworld notebook to enjoy the Python source code for generating the above plots.
I created a decoder notebook to help me understand the captured waveforms, enough to write an algorithm that decodes the individual messages to their pure bits. The algorithm was extracted from the notebook into decoder.py. The script takes a Rigol CSV as input and prints the decoded bits one line per message:
$ python decoder.py data/a1on.csv
010101010101110
0001010100010101010101110
0001010100010101010101110
0001010100010101010101110
0001010100010101010101110
0001010100010101010101110
0001010100010101010101110
00010101000101010101011
All button presses of the transmitter were captured and decoded as follows:
Button 1 ON: 0001010100010101010101110
Button 1 OFF: 0001010100010101010101000
Button 2 ON: 0001010101000101010101110
Button 2 OFF: 0001010101000101010101000
Button 3 ON: 0001010101010001010101110
Button 3 OFF: 0001010101010001010101000
Let's separate the bits a bit (:D) to clarify what's changing in each button press:
Button 1 ON: 000101010 00101 01010101 11 0
Button 1 OFF: 000101010 00101 01010101 00 0
Button 2 ON: 000101010 10001 01010101 11 0
Button 2 OFF: 000101010 10001 01010101 00 0
Button 3 ON: 000101010 10100 01010101 11 0
Button 3 OFF: 000101010 10100 01010101 00 0
^ ^
button nr on/off
Before being able to replicate the above messages with my own transmitter I need to figure out the exact timings of the signals. That I did in the signal_details notebook.
Summary:
25-bit messages are sent at an interval of44 120 ns(includes a9 620 nspause after the last bit).- Every bit is sent during
1 380 ns.- A start of
969 nshigh signal represent a digital one. - A start of
284 nshigh signal represent a digital zero. - The rest of the
1 380 nsare a low signal.
- A start of
- All this adds together:
25 * 1 380 + 9 620 = 44 120.
TODO: Next step is to decide which microcontroller I'll use to send the above signals using the off-the-shelf RF transmitter:
- Install Anaconda (v2.7.1 was used)
- Open the notebook with
jupyter notebook