Controlling a Wireless Ceiling Fan with an RTL-SDR and RPiTX on a Raspberry Pi

Over on YouTube River's Educational Channel has uploaded a new video showing how he uses a Raspberry Pi to control a ceiling fan via it's wireless control signal. Back in January we posted about River's first video where he shows him using and RTL-SDR and Universal Radio Hacker (URH) to reverse engineer the control signal.

In this new video River uses the RPiTX software to generate the control signal without requiring any additional transmit hardware. He first explains how RPiTX can generate an arbitrary signal from a square wave and talks a bit about the harmonics this creates. To reduce harmonics he adds a simple low pass filter to the GPIO output.

Next to control the fan he uses the "sendook" program that is included with RPiTX to transmit the binary control string that he reverse engineered in his original video. Finally he creates a simple web server so that he can control his ceiling fans via his phone and integrate it into his smart home.