Help with Old Air Quality Egg

Applications
1

Hoping someone in Open Energy Monitor community can help with this, although it’s related, not a direct concern. This goes on a bit, sorry!

I’ve been gifted a box of the oldest (I think) Air Quality Eggs, each one base station (no screen) and sensor egg. I’d like to try and get them going and use for a local project and send the readings to emon further along the project.

So far, I’ve powered one of them up and plugged in the ethernet cable to to the base station. It picks up an address from my DHCP and is pingable, though that seems a tiny bit flaky. It registers in my router as an Arduino 36, whatever that is?

Meanwhile I’ve attached an FTDI cable to the connectors at the far end and tried to get some connectivity via the most current Arduino IDE. The cable registers as genuine but I can’t get any board info from the base station.

My idea is ‘probably’ to modify the sketch (nanode.ino?) that contains the api URL:
char website[] PROGMEM = "api.cosm.com": to something I can use. This seems like the least invasive/radical? I’m assuming that this is the sketch in the base station, but, of course no simple way to verify.

Also, the current configurator doesn’t deal with the ethernet old version Egg, I can’t find any code or binaries for the old configurator either.

Another idea is to abandon the supplied base station make a ‘new’ one from a Feather M0 RFM69 with a modified version of the above sketch.

Anyway, slightest bit of help appreciated!

2

Welcome, Hugh, to the OEM forum.

This is something I know nothing about, though I do remember them (and the nanodeRF!). The (only?) people who I think will be able to help will be @glyn.hudson and @TrystanLea .

In the meantime, have you looked here: GitHub - openenergymonitor/Air-Quality-Egg: Stationary Air Quality Sensor Network ?

3

Hi Robert

Yes, thanks, downloaded the repo that this was forked from. And I think I’ve found Trystan’s name in one of the sketches.

This repo may be ‘better’ (for me) since it’s several commits behind therefore ‘older’. I believe I’m dealing with the first version of the AQE.

Thanks again Hugh

4

Hello @Hugh_Barnard did you get anywhere with this?

I see this code by @glyn.hudson from 12 years ago Example for using AQERemote and AQEShield with standard openenergymon… · openenergymonitor/Air-Quality-Egg@154d357 · GitHub looks fairly straightforward, but it’s just code that transmits AQE data via the RFM radio and does not use the Ethernet part of the NanodeRF, I think this was for use with a second base station receiver.

5

Hi Trystan, Thanks for taking an interest in this. Where I got to:

  1. The Egg was/is running and collects an IP address from my router.
  2. Read through various bits of code, but not the one you suggested thanks (I had the idea of using the Egg ‘partially’ also)
  3. Main problem is that I can’t get a development framework connected to the Egg via FTDI cable to recognise it
  4. . So I can’t load ‘new’ software currently. Tested the cable with vanilla Arduino, it’s OK.

Got sidetracked by another project, but haven’t given up.

Best regards Hugh