For different automation projects the Telldus Tellstick is a neat solution to let your software interface some external wireless hardware.
This document describes how to connect and setup the Telldus Tellstick on the Raspberry Pi, mostly for internal reference, but hopefully it can be of assistance to someone out there.
The first step is adding the telldus repository and public key to apt:
echo deb-src http://download.telldus.com/debian stable main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/telldus.list wget http://download.telldus.com/debian/telldus-public.key sudo apt-key add telldus-public.key rm telldus-public.key
Now update the repositories and install the build-essential package, if not already installed:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install build-essential
Get all dependencies for telldus-core:
sudo apt-get build-dep telldus-core sudo apt-get install cmake libconfuse-dev libftdi-dev help2man
Get and compile the telldus-core:
mkdir temp_a cd temp_a sudo apt-get --compile source telldus-core sudo dpkg --install *.deb
Clean up:
cd .. sudo rm -r temp_a
Now the telldus-core should be installed, and there should be a startup script in /etc/init.d/telldusd, and it’s time to connect the tellstick duo to the pi, so do that.
To add a switch to the tellstick edit the /etc/tellstick.conf file, adding a unit like so:
device {
id=[ID]
name="A name"
model="selflearning-switch:nexa"
parameters{
house="[houseID]"
unit="1"
}
If you want to know the houseID and unit number of a Nexa switch for example you need to use a sniffer. There are scripts that uses the tellstick to sniff the incoming information, but we made a simple sniffer using an Arduino and a 433MHz reciever – more on that later. (This is the setup we’re using to build custom sensors)
After setting up the config-file just restart the telldus core daemon and you’re good to go.
sudo /etc/init.d/telldusd restart