Comment by joecool1029
4 months ago
> I've got an RTL-SDR radio listening on 433Mhz near a public parking lot and I can definitely see the comings and goings of individual cars.
For anyone else looking to do the same with it this project is great: https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
That's the stuff! I've got it doing MQTT into Home Assistant at my house, and CSV into a pipe to a Python script for a commercial temperature monitoring and alerting app. The commercial app is the one that happens to be near a parking lot, but I also periodically get cars showing up on Home Assistant too.
rtl_433 has been great. The ability to capture unknown-to-it signals and build decoders on the command line is really nice. I've got some cheapie driveway motion sensors that I built a decoder for. It was exceptionally easy and all the config was runtime.
rtl_433 is awesome. You can even read your neighbors weather station and send that to Home Assistant using MQTT. It's worth investing in a decent antenna tuned to the ISM frequency (I use a center fed dipole, works great).
And of course there are cheap sensors you can find online for your own temperature probes.
Hmm, now I'm curious if I could add a Home Assistant sensor to monitor my own tire pressure.