Ardunio 433 Receiver

Yesterday I received my Adafruit Feather M0 logger that I aim to use as sampler of soil moisture in my ongoing plant-watering project.

As I had an extra 433 receiver lying about I decided to try and see if I could read my Nexa doorbell from it.

I quickly put the Arduino board on a breadbox and connected the three jumperwires (ground, 3.3v and data) between the receiver and the board so that data went to the boards port 12.

In order to get the the Ardunio IDE to recognize my Adafruit board I had to follow the steps oulined here, which were quick and easy to go through.

I then uploaded the receiver script written by Peter Mead and Barnaby Gray found on the Arduino playground to my Arduino.

The board happily accepted the program and I fired up the serial monitor of the Arduino IDE to see if I my setup would pickup the signals sent by the doorbell.

With a big smile I saw how the output from the program filled the monitor as I pressed away on the doorbell. The smile fainted however when I moved more than a few centimeters away from the antenna of the receiver and noticed how it stopped picking up signals.

This was however no big surprise as I had the same experience using the Raspberry PI earlier on. In short, the 3.3V that I can use on this board (and earlier on with the Raspberry) was just not enough to get any range with this 433 receiver.

But other than that, my first adventure with an Arduino was a success.

I really enjoyed the simplicity of working with the Arduino and how fast I could go from thought to working prototype without any hassle.

I also enjoyed the slick design of the board I used. I wish there was a 5V version of it so I could go all-in on making a Arduino-based 433-bridge for my otherwise Razberry based home automation system.


I think this board will be perfect for the soil moisture project!