Using an RTL-SDR to Monitor A Tire Pressure Sensor used in Home Brewing

Over on YouTube Andreas Spiess has been helping his friend create a pressure monitoring system for his home brew beer bottles. In order to do this, Andreas uses an externally mounted after market wireless tire pressure sensor whose data can be received with an RTL-SDR and the rtl_433 decoder software. Modern vehicle tires contain a TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system) sensor, which keeps track of tire pressure, temperature and acceleration. The data is wirelessly transmitted via 433 or 315 MHz to the cars dashboard and computer for safety monitoring.

In the first video Andreas discusses tire pressure monitors and how they could be used for other non-tire applications, talks a bit about the wireless protocol used, and how to reverse engineer it. He notes that the author of rtl_433 was able to implement his particular tire pressure sensor brand's protocol into the rtl_433 database, so now anyone can decode them. Finally in this video he also shows that he can easily spoof a flat tire signal using a HackRF and GNU Radio which might cause a modern high end car to refuse to move.

The second video shows how to continuously monitor that TPMS data for the home brew set up. Andreas uses an RTL-SDR and Raspberry Pi running rtl_433, which outputs it's data into Mosquitto, Node-Red, InfluxDB and the Grafana. These programs help to read, manage, log and graph the data. The rtl_433 program is also monitored by Supervisord which automatically restarts rtl_433 if the program crashes.

If you are interested, there is a related video that was uploaded in between the two shown below which shows how he created a 3D printed cap to mount the valve and tire pressure sensor on the beer bottles.