Control AC RF Switches with the Open433 USB Transmitter

A USB transmitter created for a custom home assistant. It may not be as pretty as Alexa, but it’s more powerful.

Smart home devices like Google Home and Alexa are simple and popular ways to transform your space into a smart home. One creator named Samuel (AKA The Static Turtle) decided to use a Raspberry Pi for this purpose but found it didn’t have enough power. He then took things a step further and developed a custom circuit board, dubbed Open433, to make a more robust in-home assistant using an old computer.

Open433 is an open source USB RF transmitter equipped with a pair of coiled antennas. The device is based on an ATmega328 running at 16MHz with an Arduino Uno bootloader and a CH340 USB to the serial converter. Samuel also added an expansion port for SDA / SCL / A0 / Pin8 (PD0) in addition to the ISCP header with the SPI bus to allow the board to be used as a standalone transmitter to send sensor values.

For its software, Samuel implemented the RCSwitch library on the Arduino and developed a Python library to work with Home Assistant, which he programmed as well. You can read that step-by-step process in his blog.

Open433 is only available to buy for $30 if you live in France. But if you have the right parts and the time, you can build your own device.m According to Samuel, you just need a barebones PCBs, which you need to flash the Arduino bootloader. You can do this using any ISCP programmer for the bootloader. Once you have that, compile and upload the sketch in the Arduino folder.

Find all the details about Open433 here.

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