The first thing to do is detecting which signal is sent when pressing the doorbell button. For this purpose, we connect the RF receiver to the LINE IN connection of a PC and record the received signals with Audacity. This way, the PC acts like a kind of occiloscope, which I think is very cool. I was really suprised when it turned out that this really works!
First, build the following circuit:
You will need two resistors: 39 KOhm and 10 KOhm (which act as voltage dividers) and an audio cable with 3 segments on its plug. I stripped the 3 wires inside the cable and soldered it to 3 pins, so I could easily plug it into a breadboard. The power (5V) is supplied by the Arduino.
Now download and install Audacity. Audactity is a free to use audio editor. With this program, you can record the signal from the LINE IN input of your PC. While recording, press the doorbell button. The signal I recorded looks like this:
You can clearly see the moment on which I pressed the doorbell button.
Zooming in reveals that the same signal is repeated over and over again, with a long, low "sync" signal inbetween:
Zooming even further:
You can see that that this signal is built from just two different "building blocks":
- a long high pulse, followed by a short low pulse. We will encode this as a "1" in our Arduino sketch later on;
- a short high pulse, followed by a long low pulse. We will encode this as a "0" in our Arduino sketch.
This means that the code sent by the doorbell button is 0101 1111 0110 0010 0000 1000. The following question is: what is the duration of each pulse? When you zoom in even further, the sample points become visible as dots:
By counting the dots and noticing the sample rate at the lower left screen of the window, you can calculate the duration of the high and low pulses.
For example: when the recorded signal has a frequenct of 48000 Hz (samples per second) and you count 25 samples in the short signal, this signal has a duration of 25/48000 = (approximately) 520 microseconds.
Also notice that a long pulse is 3 times as long as a short pulse.
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