Newbie - Apollo Smart oil monitor question, 433mhz

[stuiow]

Hi all,

Fairly new to home automation, but have several devices that I could intergrate into Domoticz if go this route.

Basically I have a davis weather station and plan on getting a meteostick so data can be imported in Domoticz, that's good.

I also am going to install Evohome on my heating and hot water system tomorrow, that also good.

One question, maybe request I have is this:-

I have oil fuelled heating. On my tank, I have a 433mhz monitoring device called a Apollo Smart.
Can anyone help me and advise me if there is a way for me to either connect this device to Domoticz (which I could do via usb - it has a CP210x chipset) and I will be running a raspberry pi B, or could I "snatch" that data out of the air with a RFXtrx433?

Domoticz looks ideal to me, i have plenty of hardware to get started with it, i have a spare raspberry pi which i used to run meteohub on, but have moved that over to a raspberry pi2, so its begging for a new use, Domoticz looks perfect, hopinh i can get the Apollo smart data on it though!

Cheers all,

Stuart

[ThinkPad]

Hi Stuart,

Welcome to this forum, enjoy your stay here!

If you are able to get some kind of output from the monitoring device through USB, and can post that here, maybe somebody can write a script for it. Maybe it is also possible to snatch the data with a RFXCOM, a lot of things have been 'reverse-engineered', so great chance it could be done that way. But if you are only going to buy a RFXtrx433 for reading out your oiltank, it is a bit pricey. I would then go the Apollo Smart + script way....

Keep us updated...

[stuiow]

Is there software out there I can install on a PC or raspberry to track what data is coming out of the apollo oil monitor attached via usb?

[blackdog65]

I have an Apollo sensor too and would love to incorporate it into Domoticz. I read here http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=162842 that the sensor transmits on FM and the RFXCOM is AM... is this right?

If it's a "no no" then I guess I'll have to go down the MySensors route, but that doesn't seem to play nicely with Z-Wave for some reason.

[ThinkPad]

Is there software out there I can install on a PC or raspberry to track what data is coming out of the apollo oil monitor attached via usb?

I would try something like 'putty' on Windows... but i don't know the baudrate, so you have to try some things

And maybe it won't show you anything, because it first needs some command to trigger it to give output or so... don't know

[dwmw2]

We do have the Apollo sensor working with rtl_433 now, using a cheap DVB-T receiver dongle and doing the signal processing in software. I haven't looked hard at how much CPU it actually takes, and if it's feasible to make it work on a Raspberry Pi. The alternative would be to hook up an RFM01 receiver to do it; there are plenty of examples of using those with the Pi.

See http://www.domoticz.com/wiki/Lua_-_Oil_Tank_Monitor