The FunTechHouse project, a open source home automation system - Tellstick sensors

Abstract

This page will show how to use the Tellstick Duo to send misc wireless sensor data over to a MQTT server.

The sensor

Some time ago I got a kit with a humidity sensor and receiver, however the radio part of this kit did not work 90% of the time and since it is a closed solution I almost disposed of it. But since the sensor had a little display that displayed relative humidity and temperature, I left it in the Laundry room so I could look at it now and then.

Then I noticed that the Tellstick Duo had support for this type of sensors, and since the Tellstick Duo is open I figured I could try it out.

For reference I got that sensor a Clas Ohlson where it is simply called "Temperaturgivare/hygrometer" with product id 36-1797.

Please note that this sensor is not open in any sense!

Tellstick Duo

The Tellstick Duo is created by a company called Telldus Technologies AB and is located in Lund (a city in Skåne, Sweden).

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But the thing with the Tellstick Duo is that it is running open source firmware! You can find the firmware over at their github page as user telldus.

One thing to note about the Tellstick Duo is that they are not using all open tools to build it, so if you would like to enhance it you need to get things like the Hi-Tech C Pro for the PIC18 MCU Family (so that is a bummer).

But the code is there!!!.

For more information on what is open go to their dev page: http://developer.telldus.se/.

Install telldus-core

To install this on a normal Ubuntu PC, I followed the TellStick Installation on Ubuntu.

wget -q http://download.telldus.se/debian/telldus-public.key -O- | sudo apt-key add -

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list
# Tellstick Duo
deb http://download.telldus.com/debian/ stable main

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install telldus-core tellduscenter libtelldus-core-dev

Please note that when the telldus is connected to your pc you shall find something like this with lsusb

Bus 001 Device 015: ID 1781:0c31 Multiple Vendors

And the info needed to use this lib can be found here: http://developer.telldus.se/doxygen/.

FunTechHouse Tellstick Sensor

https://github.com/jsiei97/FunTechHouse_Tellstick_Sensor

This app is using the mosquitto api for mqtt, so make sure mosquitto is installed on this pc.

cd ~
mkdir -p funtech/
cd funtech/
git clone git@github.com:jsiei97/FT_Tools.git
cd FT_Tools/

./install.mosquitto.sh

Then install the FunTechHouse Tellstick Sensor application.

cd ~/funtech/
git clone git@github.com:jsiei97/FunTechHouse_Tellstick_Sensor.git
cd FunTechHouse_Tellstick_Sensor

qmake
make
./Tellstick2MQTT