enOcean

enOcean is a pretty cool energy harvesting technology focused on smart home applications. enOcean is best known for the wireless light switches that don't require a battery to operate. additionally, they come in looks compatible to Feller edizio due and hager callysto, which are used in almost every building in switzerland.

the light switch has a piezo module built in which uses the energy of the button-push to create enough electricity to send a datagram to the enOcean receiver to tell it that the switch has been pushed.

another nice thing about enOcean is the fact, that they sell a pretty affordable (15$ range) module called TCM310 which can be used to both send or receive enOcean data packages over the air. The protocol is also openly documented.

my goal is to use a TCM310 in the form of an enOcean Pi module together with ideally a sonoff or some other ESP8266 based board to receive push button presses and send them to an MQTT broaker. As the “enOcean PI” product name says, the module is acutally made for a raspberry pi and I am sure, that my goal could be achieved simpler by using a raspberry Pi. But i want this to be a set-and-forget system, and a full blown linux server to me is just not such a thing. however, we will see how it works out.. maybe i'll revert to the easy path in case it gets too complicated to do it all on an ESP8266 :)

there are only four pins which are used on the enOcean PI module:

thanks to Kerry D. Wong who published this Information