LORA for BRESSER 5 in1 Weather Station (MAKE IOT)

Description

I stumbled across a Bresser 5in1 Weather Station on Ebay. in my neigbourhood lots of old people have them in their Houses.
The weather station is capbale of measunging: Temperature, Windspeed, Humdity, Wind-Direction, Rain.
These Wether station only display a very limited dataset. I always tought:
What a waste: Can't we make this weather stations smarter and bring the data online and store it somewhere. What if we log multiple weatherstations and build a model of your city with it.

Details

Did you ever wonder how these cheap weather stations transmit Data?

If you search the web you may find some information where people use RTL SDR TV sticks to decode such data.

My idea was: Why use such power hungry devices that draw a lot of battery if you can go smaller and more efficent.

Thats why I built a small decoder for this cheap weather stations from Bresser.

The idea was to place this decoder out in the wild and transmit the decoded data via Lora to my home.

With this idea I can make my own accurate local weather model with very remote sensors.

You can check wind direction, rain, Heat in remote areas without need for a mobilephone network.

Efficeny is good due to the fact that the microcontroller will sleep the most of the time.

Right now I am in Beta phase. Decoding works, LoRa Transmission works.... time to get a housing and try it out in the wild

Files

schematics.pdf

Schematic of my own Hardware Board: ESP32 + RFM95 Battery optimized

Adobe Portable Document Format - 139.95 kB - 07/24/2022 at 20:03

Preview

Components

1 × A ESP32 Board with LoRA (built yourself one or buy one)

1 × CC1101 868 MHZ Chip

1 × Antenna 868MHz

1 × Bresser 5in1 or 6in1 Weather Station

1 × some time

Project Logs

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Decoding on a TTGO Lora 32 T3 V1.6
Ulrich • 08/14/2022 at 15:43 • 6 comments

This afternoon I had the time to adapt the code to a TTGO Lora 32 T3 V1.6 Board.
This makes it very easy for LORA beginner to add support
All you need to change on the hardware is one solder bridge: Connect GPIO1 of the LORA Module to the free GPIO12
like shown in the picture:
You may find my Arduino code here:
https://github.com/Uspizig/Bresser_Weather_NEW/tree/main/WeatherDecoder_LORA_RFM95Only
Decoding with RFM95 (No More CC1101)
Ulrich • 08/13/2022 at 12:15 • 0 comments

Finally I could achieve decoding without using a CC1101 and transmit to LoRA via TTN Network the Data.
I purely use RFM for both
Deocding of the Bresser Weather station
Once finished this data is transmitted over the RFM95 to the TheThingsNetwork
Software Development
Ulrich • 07/24/2022 at 19:48 • 0 comments

You may find several resoureces on the web where people tried to decode Bresser Weather station data with an RTL SDR Stick.
In my opinion running a Rasp Pi just for decoding some RF Weather data is a overkill of resources.
There ought to be a smarter solution!!!
The Bresser Weather Stations transmits trhe data in an FSK Modulation:
You may find detailed information about the proticol here: or here. I cant explain it better than they did.
Based on this idea I started to search for a decoder and foudn a CC1101 Chip. I call it the swiss army knife of RF Recivers.
With this Receiver and the Lib Radiolib you may decode a lot of stuff easily.
#
This is how the game begun:
With some help of the Twitter community I finally got it to work:
Hardware
Ulrich • 07/24/2022 at 19:40 • 0 comments

To receive the signals produced by the Bresser Weather Station I designed in Kicad a small Hardware layout.
This Board consist of a ESP32-PicoD4 Microcontroller, an RGB LED, 7 GPIO Pins, a Voltage supply and a LORA CHIP RFM95.
Hint: This Board is optional and not mandatory. You may use any other Board e.g. from Lilygo which has a valid SX127x Chip from Semtech.
The benefit of my own design is the formfactor.. I wanted it to be as small as possible.
You may find the Schematics here:
Hardware FIles
Right now you need to add anCC1101 Receiver to this Hardware. You may find these Boards cheap on Ebay
I am about to check weather this CC1101 Chip can be removed and everything is handled by the RFM95 LoRa Chip alone.
The Bad/ugly thing about this CC1101 Module is the PinDistance is 2mm while most development Boards have a pin distance of 2.54 mm.
To Connect this CC1101 To the Board with a standard 3.3V, GND, 4GPIOs you may need one of these adapter board that I found on Amazon.
They adapt the distance to your needs.
Next you may solder these Pins straight forward: Pinning might be found here Link:
Luckily these fits to most headers on development Boards
Holiday
Ulrich • 07/23/2022 at 20:40 • 0 comments

Right now on a holiday in Bavaria.... Be right back.

View all 5 project logs

Build Instructions

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Install Arduino IDE with ESP32 support

There are plenty of instructions out there: I cant explain it any better: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/installing-the-esp32-board-in-arduino-ide-windows-instructions/

Download and install the needed libaries for Arduino IDE

Radiolib: https://github.com/jgromes/RadioLib

Solder or connect a CC1101 Board to an ESP32 Mikrocontroller Board

Discussions

Maria Piecha wrote 08/07/2022 at 13:37

Hi, in the meantime I tried this project with RFM95 and ESP32 which works well https://github.com/matthias-bs/BresserWeatherSensorReceiver Cheers Maria

Are you sure? yes | no

Ulrich wrote 08/07/2022 at 16:07

Thanks Maria for this link: Will give it a try. Seen that this code does not transmit any data over LORA. Mayber I can modify it ... Cheers Uli

Are you sure? yes | no

Ulrich wrote 08/07/2022 at 17:23

Tried this code now on 2 different board(TTGO V1.6 and my OWN)... Gave me some headache and now it works. Cheers Maria!!!... Now starts the implementation for LORA for TheThingsnetwork without the CC1101

Raw Data:FF 75 44 51 03 03 18 FF FF FF 25 88 FF F7 6D FF 01 3F AA 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 2C
Id: [44510303] Battery: [OK ] Ch: [0] Temp: [---.-C] Hum: [---%] Wind max: [ 0.0m/s] Wind avg: [ 0.0m/s] Wind dir: [258.0deg] Rain: [ 89.2mm] RSSI: [-71.0dBm]

..............................................[SX1276] Data: D4 CA 6D 44 51 3 3 18 FF FF FF 25 88 28 76 22 FF F0 F3 AA 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

[SX1276] R [D4] RSSI: -71.5

Raw Data:CA 6D 44 51 03 03 18 FF FF FF 25 88 28 76 22 FF F0 F3 AA 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 2C
Id: [44510303] Battery: [OK ] Ch: [0] Temp: [ 28.7C] Hum: [ 22%] Wind max: [ 0.0m/s] Wind avg: [ 0.0m/s] Wind dir: [258.0deg] Rain: [-----.-mm] RSSI: [-71.5dBm]

...........................[SX1276] Data: D4 AE EB 20 20 10 AE 11 7F CD F4 49 11 FD 19 93 FE 2 98 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Are you sure? yes | no

Maria Piecha wrote 08/12/2022 at 21:06

There is a LoRa version as well, but too complex for me https://github.com/matthias-bs/BresserWeatherSensorTTN Cheers Maria

Are you sure? yes | no

tiefpunkt wrote 07/27/2022 at 07:59

Nice! I'm curious whether you made any progress on using the RFM95 for the FSK stuff as well. I never got around to try that for another project ;)

Are you sure? yes | no

Ulrich wrote 07/29/2022 at 21:03

Got sucess: Please see updates in the project log

Are you sure? yes | no

Ulrich wrote 08/06/2022 at 14:23

I was stuck but a close Twitter friend Rainer got inspired and was sucessful:

https://twitter.com/things_network/status/1550890190868303872

Are you sure? yes | no

Maria Piecha wrote 07/23/2022 at 21:13

Thanks a lot and have a nice holiday

Are you sure? yes | no

Ulrich wrote 07/23/2022 at 20:37

Sure.. I am right now on a holiday... Will update soon

Are you sure? yes | no

Maria Piecha wrote 07/23/2022 at 17:14

Hi Ulrich.

Great project. It would be nice of you could publish more details so that it would be possible to build myself a similar system.

Cheers Maria

Are you sure? yes | no

LORA for BRESSER 5 in1 Weather Station (MAKE IOT)

Description

Details

Files

schematics.pdf

Components

Project Logs

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Decoding on a TTGO Lora 32 T3 V1.6

Decoding with RFM95 (No More CC1101)

Software Development

Hardware

Holiday

Build Instructions

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Discussions

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LORA for BRESSER 5 in1 Weather Station (MAKE IOT)

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