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Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Tue 12 Jan 2010 10:40 am
by bendelahaye
How can I use my Weaterstation (TFA-Nexus) with your program? Used by USB. Windows Vista. Thanks for your help, Ben

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Tue 12 Jan 2010 10:49 am
by daj
Hi Ben,

I believe not, as the protocol for the device is not publicly available

(https://cumulus.hosiene.co.uk/viewtopic.p ... TFA#p16089)

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Tue 12 Jan 2010 2:57 pm
by franciscus
There is a shareware program called Weather Display that apparently can read the Nexus. At least it is in the setup for that program. I dont know if the author paid for that privilege or not.

http://www.weather-display.com/index.php

The web capability is an add-on it seems at extra cost of course. Perhaps this info might help Steve find the protocols??

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Mon 25 Jan 2010 1:35 pm
by dmac
I have tried (oh how I have tried ) to get Weatherdisplay to work with the Nexus/Irox/Honeywell weatherstaion. The program is very unreliable (or the weatherstation but appears accurate with the Nexus software) and the final step was when suddenly the indoor temperature started registering at 13.2 degrees celcius! It was 20.5 in the house , console and Nexus software. Even a reinstall produced a simarly low temperature. It was 5.5 degrees outside.

The nexus has an inbuilt data logger on 1MB.

I have tried other software and they are worse. I am hoping Cumulus will take on this weatherstation. Can I help? In a non-programming role?

If there are any Nexus/Irox/Honeywell lurkers out there then logon as we need a critical mass.

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Mon 25 Jan 2010 1:41 pm
by steve
dmac wrote:I have tried other software and they are worse. I am hoping Cumulus will take on this weatherstation. Can I help? In a non-programming role?

If there are any Nexus/Irox/Honeywell lurkers out there then logon as we need a critical mass.
It's not a question of getting enough people to ask for it to be supported. It is impossible for me to do it without the spec of the protocol; I can't even consider doing it without that.

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Mon 25 Jan 2010 3:38 pm
by dmac
I see and probably the NZ authour of WD paid IROX et all for the sole rights for access the the API/protocol. Anyway thanks for your reply and the software looks good. My next machine will be one on the Cumulus suport list.

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Mon 25 Jan 2010 4:08 pm
by steve
dmac wrote:I see and probably the NZ authour of WD paid IROX et all for the sole rights for access the the API/protocol.
I think he bought a station and reverse-engineered the protocol. Or perhaps he did obtain the protocol from the manufacturer as well as buying a station.

Interestingly, this page lists third-party "partners" software which supports the station: http://www.hidekielectronics.us/Support.html

I suppose it's worth me asking them for the protocol, you never know...

Then I'd just have to find the time to do it!

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Mon 25 Jan 2010 4:15 pm
by steve
I've sent them an email.

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Tue 02 Feb 2010 1:59 pm
by RonnyR
Hi,

it would be great, if we could use this software with the TFA Nexus.

With WsWin (http://www.pc-wetterstation.de), it is possible to built up a connection with the Nexus (TE923/924 Mebus, Irox, Honeywell, Cresta).... maybe this is helpful for you.


I look forward to usw my Nexus with Cumulus :D


Regards

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Fri 22 Oct 2010 9:19 am
by SpeedyC
Found someone that have reverse-engineered the protocol.

He got a webpage where the source code is downloadable at
http://te923.fukz.org/index

Seems to work as just a parser to recieve and decode the information with output to the console only if I understood it right.

It's written in C++ for linux.

I don't know what programming language is used for Cumulus but I could probably help out if you need help translate to whatever you use.

And of course got an IROX that I can test on :)

----------------
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Fri 22 Oct 2010 9:35 am
by steve
Yes, I've seen that before. It does make it slightly less impossible. Now all I need is a supply of days with more than 24 hours in them.

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Wed 27 Oct 2010 6:26 pm
by SpeedyC
So far I managed to resolve this would be the sequence of transmit and receive order to the Irox to get current values hold in the station. I don't have any tools or code to help me test this out, either would do to help me figure more of it out.

Delphi style:

using array[0..x] of byte;
cc is the checksum byte
adr=packed record case boolean of
true: i : integer;
false: b0,b1,b2,b3 : byte;
end;


transmit:
05 AF FB 00 00 cc AF FE
cc=<xor checksum of 1-4>

receives:
5A ?? ?? <v1> ?? <v2> ... cc
array[33]=<xor checksum of 0-32>
adr.i=(v1*256+v2)*38+257


transmit:
05 AF <adr.b0> <adr.b1> <adr.b2> cc AF FE
cc=<xor checksum of 1-4>

receives: //memcpy( rbuf, buf + 5, 11 ); (missing a byte?)
5A <month> <day> <year> <minute>
<temp0.lowbyte> <temp0.highbyte> <humidity0>
<temp1.lowbyte> <temp1.highbyte> <humidity1>
<temp2.lowbyte> <temp2.highbyte> <humidity2>
<temp3.lowbyte> <temp3.highbyte> ... cc
array[33]=<xor checksum of 0-32>


transmit:
adr.i=adr.i+16
05 AF <adr.b0> <adr.b1> <adr.b2> cc AF FE
cc=<xor checksum of 1-4>

receives: //memcpy( rbuf + 11, buf + 1, 21 );
5A <humidity3> ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? <uv> <uv> <pressure> <pressure> <storm/status>
<wind> <wind> <wind> <wind> <wind> <wind> <wind> ?? <raincount> <raincount> ... cc
cc=<xor checksum of 0-32>

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Sun 30 Jan 2011 7:14 pm
by pfoomer
Hi

The following may be of interest in trying to communicate with a TE923 or its many derivatives.

Trying to get the protocol from the manufacture proved fruitless, they don't appear to want to assist anyone.
That said there are two programs, WeatherDisplay and Weathersnoop that have achieved accessing the device that are in the public domain.
Weather snoop is osx only AFAIK, WeatherDisplay is cross platform., also Meteohub, a modified router has achieved this.
All these solution are not free.

The device used in the station is a
Product ID: 0x6801
Vendor ID: 0x1130 (Tenx Technology, Inc.)
Version: 3.02
Speed: Up to 1.5 Mb/sec

This is a HID (Human Interface Device, i.e. a joystick/mouse class) which causes problems with trying to access it.

Certain things, dependent on the OS have to be done to prevent the device being grabbed by the OS (on osx, a kext is required, on linux some other stuff, windows, don't know), unless you write a native driver to use the HID routines.
On OSX, WD has not achieved this, WeatherSnoop appears to have.

Of course the manufacturer has done this, in their Windows program, probably a DLL to communicate with the station, wrapped by a gui.

On meteohub, running linux, not sure how this was achieved.

As for decoding, the TE923 protocol referred to earlier in this thread is a useful basis which to start, there is one error , search for TE923 MrBalky, he found it, and also managed to get it working on linux.

Finally, someone else got a driver working on OSX, that was the hard part, and wrapped it Java using jni/jna and is happily downloading data into a mysql database, for presentation with another java program for the graphing and reports.

:)

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Tue 01 Feb 2011 3:38 am
by SpeedyC
Many thanks for the response pfoomer.

I've seen MrBalky's code but as I'm a pure windows developer here it don't help me much more than fukz site.
From reading the code I could get the information I posted in the previous post, but Linux way of reading from a HID device is nothing like Windows.
What I need is something to test it out and confirm how it works.
Preferably a simple monitoring program to monitor/read data of a HID device with the option to send data back to it.
Otherwise a Delphi/C++ program that shows how to read and write data to a HID device would be nice but I found neither. The samples I found was to complicated and I didn't have enough time needed to go through all that code just to make a simple monitoring program and there was no response on this channel either.

Currently I'm working abroad so I don't have access to my weather station until I'm back in April.

Re: Connecting with TFA-Nexus

Posted: Tue 01 Feb 2011 6:41 am
by pfoomer
SpeedyC wrote:Many thanks for the response pfoomer.

I've seen MrBalky's code but as I'm a pure windows developer here it don't help me much more than fukz site.
From reading the code I could get the information I posted in the previous post, but Linux way of reading from a HID device is nothing like Windows.
What I need is something to test it out and confirm how it works.
Preferably a simple monitoring program to monitor/read data of a HID device with the option to send data back to it.
Otherwise a Delphi/C++ program that shows how to read and write data to a HID device would be nice but I found neither. The samples I found was to complicated and I didn't have enough time needed to go through all that code just to make a simple monitoring program and there was no response on this channel either.

Currently I'm working abroad so I don't have access to my weather station until I'm back in April.
Hi
The decoding in my opinion is the easier bit as most of the groundwork was done by Fukz, I transferred his 'C' into java.

The hard bit in my case was the HID driver for OSX.

However, the weather capture program for windows uses a dll, perhaps the dll to gui info could be captured ( I do not know if this is easy, I do not program on windows) and the calls identified, perhaps this could be used with a wrapper for cumulus?