Some of you have had issues when the tags have almost, but not quite, enough of range to reach your Raspberry Pi or other data collector. Maybe the tags are in middle of freezer and get attenuated by the surrounding metal, maybe something else.
We have made a quick pilot of a firmware which repeats BLE advertisement broadcasts. The repeater is placed in a middle of tags which are poorly received and receiver. The program flow is very simple: Scan until advertisement is seen, change own MAC to the MAC of received advertisement, rebroadcast as the original tag, return to scanning.
A few points to consider:
This firmware eats the battery fast. Expect less than a week of runtime on a RuuviTag running on a coin cell. It’s recommended to feed RuuviTag with external 3.3V, some soldering required.
The firmware should run on pretty much any nRF52832, including Nordic Devkits which conveniently have USB supplies.
There is no echo protection, if you put 2 of these next to each other they might bounce data between each other forever.
If you have a Ruuvi DevKit you can flash the firmware binaries from Jenkins or compile the sources yourself. You can also update your SDK12.3 tags which we ship from the Ruuvi Shop over Bluetooth, but there is no way to recover the tags without wired connection if something goes wrong with the update. For now we ask you to not update the SDK over the air unless you have the DevKit available to keep your Ruuvis safe. Typically latest tagged release, such as 0.1.4 is a good starting point.
If you’re interested in this kind of a repeater, please let us know how it works for you and what kind of features you’re expecting or wanting. If the repeater is useful we’ll spend some time in polishing the firmware further.
Sounds interesting and I might have use for it. However, it would need to run on battery for much longer. I wonder could you make the repeater to save some battery with smarter logic. Otherwise, I might look into hardware with external power.
It would be possible to run with lower duty cycles, e.g. on for 10 seconds every 2 minutes. I’d like to get some feedback about the usefulness of repeating before committing to work on it though.
An actual mesh where you could read information of any of your RuuviTags within reach any of them would be the optimal solution. You could then place them all around and don’t have to think too much where you place for example your Raspberry Pi Home Assistant, Homebridge or any other device. Also, you could utilise Ruuvi Station mobile application better as well from a larger area. However, I think there are mesh capable firmwares separately and it would be a major effort to implement compared to what we are talking about here now.
The repeater would be useful in my case since then the outdoor RuuviTag could repeat measurements from my car which is too far away otherwise. However, I can solve that with Raspberry Pi Zero to deliver the information to my Homebridge or Home Assistant where I want the information to end-up anyway. That’s the setup where the sensors report at fixed locations. Then on the move Ruuvi Station is handy for the mobile RuuviTags.
Hello
I finally have time to play around with the repeater. Is there a way to see which signal come from the repeater or direct from the sensor ? (beside the dBm)
Or other easy way to test what the repeater actually do?
I give it a test