History of this Hamulight L2046 RF controller
I came across a problem in daily life. I could not control my porch LED lights with Home Assistant. No aftermarket RF controller is available to control Hamulight L2046 with home automation.
Every time i had to use the standard L2046 remote control to switch ON / OFF the lights when needed. I wanted Home Assistant to control the L2046 LED transformer, with the help of a motion detection sensor connected to Home Assistant.
The idea was started to reverse engineer the remote control codes for:
- Switch ON and OFF Hamulight L2046 connected LED lights
- Set brightness to 25% / 50% / 75% / 100% of Hamulight L2046 connected LED lights
As the codes will be send on 433MHz (free transmitting 70cm band) it can occur the Hamulight L2046 will not respond due to disturbances on the 70cm band. If the Hamulight L2046 does not corretly respond by turning the LED lights ON / OFF or Brightness level, the remote code needs to be send again.
This will happen aprox. once every 30 times a command is send to Humalight L2046 LED transformer.
The project HAMULIGHT 3.6V PWM FEEDBACK ESPHOME will provide a feedback of the brightness of the L2046 connected LEDs by examining the L2046 output PWM signal with the help of simple electronics and ESP8266 D1_MINI_V3 running ESPHOME.
I did spend some time to look at the signals send by the standard remote control and figured out the protocol used by Hamulight L2046.
Below is an excel file, which explains the protocol.
The idea was/is to send commands over an USB/serial connection to my own Hamulight RF controller. During testing in the past year a simple 433MHz transmitter and receiver modules was not stable.
I also own a RFXCOM 433MHz transciever module, which is a very stable module. I opend the module to check what kind of RF circuitry is used. A famous chip from Texas Instruments CC1101 tranceiver is used in the RFXCOM.
The thoughts at the beginning of this project was to use a CC1101 module connected to a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller.
The Pi Pico (RP2040) was chosen as i have some experience with this microcontroller. For the CC1101 i had to gain some knowledge, but it was a not so difficult steap learning curve.
CC1101 modules are easy to get on the web. This module has a SPI bus for initialising and setting modes. One pin can be configured as data input of the CC1101 and one pin can be configured as data output of the CC1101.
The CC1101 is set in ASK/OOK mode. The CC101 data input pin is used to send the RF codes ( copied from original remote control) to L2046. The CC1101 data output pin is used for receiving remote control codes for learning a L2046 remote control.
In LEARN mode the module listens for 10 seconds if the ON/OFF button is pressed on the original Hamulight remote control. If a Hamulight remote for L2046 is recognized, the original remote controller codes will be stored in the flash memory of the module.
Below you can see the connections from and to the Pi Pico and CC1101 module
The Pi Pico can be programmed with an xxxxx.UF2 file. Press and hold the boot Button on the Pi Pico and connect the USB cable to a windows PC.
The Pi Pico will act as an USB drive. Download the below zip file and use the hamulight_L2046.UF2 file and copy to this drive. The Pi Pico will be programmed with the UF2 file.
In the above zip file there is also an UF2 file called flash_nuke.UF2 . This file can be used to clear the flash memory in the Pi Pico. The zip file also contains STL files for a casing for the Pi Pico micro connected to the CC1101 module.
The Sourcecode of the PI Pico is also included in the ZIP file. I'm sorry, but i'm not a programmer, but i managed to get the whole module working to control my Hamulight L2046 LED transformer.
If you look in the sourcecode you will find the commands, which can be given to the module
- SETTINGS This will show the remote controller code, which is stored in internal flash memory. Serial number of 0000 means no remote control in flash memory.
- LEARN This will set the PI Pico in learing remote controller mode. For 10 seconds the PI Pico will listen on 433MHz for a Hamulight L2046 remote control.
- VON / VOFF This will send the ON/OFF command to the Hamulight L2046. ON and OFF remote codes are the same.
- B25 This will set the brightness to 25%.
- B50 This will set the brightness to 50%.
- B75 This will set the brightness to 75%.
- B100 This will set the brightness to 100%.