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We've lots of more or less cheap 433MHz Switchable Power-Outlets in the house, mostly for decorative lights. You get them for under 15€ in the Building Center, three at once with a remote control. Usually, you can control four switches with one remote, period. (A promising exceptions are the device from Intertechno.)

Now I was looking for a way to

  1. Control the switches from different manufacturers with one remote.
  2. Control them from really remote - from the office or from holiday.
  3. Control them programmatically.
There are a couple of Arduino libraries out there which are working with this cheap 433MHz senders and receivers from China: sender_receiver
I tried several ones, not all a really working, but finally I stopped at https://github.com/sui77/rc-switch, which works really good.

First challenge now is to get the codes out of the remotes. For this purposes the rc-switch library provides an example sketch for the Arduino. I extended it a bit and got this:

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Software for this thing can be found here https://gitlab.com/wolutator/433Receiver.git.

This is how it works:

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The second challenge is to send the codes out into air and let the power switches receive them. This is done with this thing:

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It is a Arduino Ethernet Board with a PoE-adapter and the 433MHz sender directly attached to it. I glued it under a table in the living room.

This thing received messages via MQTT and send them out via 433MHz.

The software is here at Gitlab.

BTW: do not expect beautiful software, this has been made on Halloween evening and night when waiting for the kids to come home.