Sonoff RF Bridge Review

I got a new product from IT the CC the makers of Sun off and this time is the sum of bridge our bridges the device which allows you to connect your for free free megahertz RF devices with the evey link application and control your other son of devices and pretty much vice versa so in this video I'm going to look at the RF bridge itself how to set it up how to connect to evey link application and I'm going to look at using this RF link we'd a couple of RF devices that I have at home some of these devices are supplied by ITT as well so for example this motor sensor this door sensor so this magnetic relay switch and also I got this key fob from them but I also have some other remotes different key fobs this big e key for which controls five of these mains relay I also have a water leakage sensor which unfortunately doesn't work that was probably the other arrival so I'm just going to discard that and I also have this really cheap DIY for 50 megahertz relay that I will be using in this video the reason I'm using all these devices because I just want to show that the son of bridge is not limited to only RF devices that I go that are supplied by eyeteeth but you can get your own devices these were purchased from Aliexpress in Bank good looking at other youtube videos on the our bridge it seems that this unit has gone through a few design iterations because i have seen different physical form of these books this is probably the latest one so it's basically a black box you have the Sun of logo which is going to light up blue gets par on one side there is a pairing button yeah so there is a pairing button and their micro USB input to supply five volts for this unit it is not supplied with any USB power plug or cables or anything but you can use basically any phone charger that you have I measure that need this unit uses about 70 milliamps at five volts so basically any old mobile phone charger with the USB micro USB plug is going to be sufficient other than that we have two LEDs on the top there is a blue LED which it will indicate the Wi-Fi activity and there is a orange or red LED which is going to show any of the RF activity so here I'm using my own USB adapter and cable to power the saw off and I also have the e V link application started as you can see the the Summer Bridge is not registered or not added to the e-bidding application so I'm just going to press the repair button I'm using a what is it a toothpick or any point a device is going to work so just keep the button pressed for a couple of seconds until you see the quick flashing pattern on the blue light and I can start having the device so I do the pairing I need to provide my Wi-Fi name and the Wi-Fi password so I do that and I just do the normal pairing procedure that I would form for any other son of device so it's going to look for the RF preach at the moment of course you need to have the phone and the RF bridge close to each other and also relatively close to the router so it receives the signal from the access point and we can see already the message that is found one device and it's doing the registration so we just have to wait oh it's already done so I just need to leave name the device I'm just going to call it RF Ridge and I complete and yes and then hopefully I can already see my RF bridge so that's how it looks like and when you go into the device details you have this empty page or empty layout and we are just going I'm just going to go through the the main settings here so up here when you click the the free buttons you have the loop timer the settings and you can delete this from your account so it's exactly the same features that we see from other devices you can see the the name the RF widget has the latest version and this alarm history which is going to send you an alarm whenever they are any RF device sends a signal I'm going to turn this off later on because it just gets to knowing after some time we have the share button the schedule button and the condom button which works exactly the same as any other sort of device but we will see later that you can configure it per individual RF unit and now what we are going to do we are going to pair a device with the RF link okay so I just move the stuff around so everything is in short and now I'm going to pair the the PIR sensor or the motion sensor and the first step is to click on this add RF remote button on the lower right corner and then you need to select the RF remote and that's going to be a an alarm type and I'm going to later on tell the difference between all the all the difference alarms but obviously this is an alarm so we are going to use their alarm and now we have added a new alarm so we just added like a new removed it doesn't really know what the signal for or the command for this remote is so we are going to teach the RF link to recognize the this alarm or this PIR sensor and to do that you click on the icon so this alarm icon you keep press and hold and now you can see that the RF link reaches in parables so it is waiting for a signal so I just activate the PIR sensor you near second beep and that basically says that the the PIR sensor is now paired with the RF bridge and this is not doing too much at the moment so it just basically sitting there showing you that you have one alarm or one PIR sensor motion sensor registered and as soon as it triggers you can see that it has triggered you can see the blue light here a blue light again you can also see a flashing orange on the RF reach showing that it has received a signal and you can see some stuff on the screen as well so yes you see an update what was the latest alarm and you also get these messages which I really hate because they just become too much after some time so if you want to get rid of it you can just go to settings and delete the alarm history it says alarm history but actually it removes these notifications and still you can come here to the three-arm history and you can see all the alarms the reason you see so many because I have actually done this pairing process before so probably tremendously sold these previous alarms and by the way you can rename the device here so I can just say the IR sensor okay that's it what about another one let me move this away and then let's use the door sensor so again the same procedure on RF remote it's going to be an alarm as well and then okay and then I click on the icon as you can see the icon at the moment is great because it's not paid yet so click and hold activate the sensor wait for the second beep and now it's done so let me remove this one sorry rename door sensor farm okay so now we have two sensors let me add one more device and that's going to be the these main sockets and I have five of these main sockets one of them are here so it looks like this is like a European standard RF made socket and that's the remove for it so it has like five buttons to control each of the the sockets turned on and off so I'm going to add a new RF remote and I only have up to like four buttons here so I'm just going to use the four button one and as you can see as I have the four buttons and I need to just pair them one by one so if I click on this one click sometimes you have to send a signal twice if it doesn't work for the first time then you send it again second one done third one done fourth one okay so I have the four buttons and in fact you can register the fifth button by adding a new one button device and just pair it like that before we go any further let's look at the setup again so I have my usual boards where I have the son of basing to touch the t bond the th10 mounted I have the RF bridge here I have two of the wall plugs number one and two connected which are operated by this remote and basically that remote comes with a plugs so they are pad by factory so I can operate number one and I can operate number two and I have a few other devices as well and the door sensor I don't have all of them here because they pretty much work the same way I mean as far as the RF link concerns it is basically a trigger and whether that's is sent by a motion sensor or door sensor or a key fob it doesn't really matter it what really matters is how we configure them and before we go any further just one more thing because you might ask you know why I need to bother with video are if I can just by you know sort of basics or the touch and have those control any of my devices or all of my devices well I can think of a couple of reasons for example if you have one of these wall plugs laying around at home I mean they are quite cheap you can get them from any of the hardware stores and and in Europe they also turn up in all these and Lidl so they can be both quite cheap I mean this one came from Aliexpress so if you have these around you might as well just you know reuse them because they work with a remove quite nicely but now you can add the RF link and you can control it over your smart phone as well so it just makes them let's say smarter the other thing I can think of is that most of these devices like the PAPR are sensor I battery-powered so they are quite convenient in places where you don't have wiring or you don't want to have wires so for example if you want to install a few more PIR sensors and you can't get wires to those places then a battery-operated RF PIR sensor is going to be a good solution these RF units are generally consume very little power so they are ideal for battery operation and not to mention that you have a lot more products RF products that you can buy from you know anywhere like ally or banggood then you have some of devices also one more thing if you remember the title t1 if you want to install them in a normal wall socket where you have your regular switches you need to have both neutral and live wires because that needs constant 24 220 or 120 volts to operate so again if your house has all the wiring you don't have neutral in your wall sockets you won't be able to use the touch so you might want to use a sort of basic and have that controlled wire like just a general-purpose RF switch or or you can also find and buy RF switches which look like regular war switch it wolf switches and probably one Russ reason I can think of is is range as far as I know Wi-Fi has a limited range and if you live in a big house you probably have noticed that in the farthest corner of your house you might not have Wi-Fi and especially on the son of devices which only have this really small PCB mounted antenna getting a proper Wi-Fi signal could be an issue and these RF devices might outperform Wi-Fi devices in terms of range if you go back to the main screen you see the you have the RF bridge now and it's connected and you can click on these up and down arrows to operate the to open up at each of the like sets or a device within the RF bridge and so the one way to use the RF bridge is to control your old RF sockets so for example I have this one here so that's already paired with the unit as I've shown you before I have already paired this unit with the RF bridge so I learn so this the RF bridge learned the first four buttons and if I press the first button on the application then it sends out the signal what I would what what this remote would also send out if I press number 1 and the first socket over there you can't really see the status light is really dim has turned on and if I press number 2 then well nothing really happens I'm guessing it's a little bit hidden miss and you really have to experiment with it and the way this remote is working is that it has a separate removed and therefore a separate code for on and off so if I turn remove number one off and if I press the button again that it turns on if I press the button again then nothing really happens because the RF reach now only learns I learned the on comment for the socket number one so I would need to create another set of or buttons so I can train the off signals as well and actually off-camera I quickly did that so you can see that I have the first four buttons which are trained for the own signals and the second four buttons which are trained for the off signals so I can turn the relay on by pressing the first of the top four and then so you might say that this is a classic fair situation but the truth is that they're probably multiple standards around when it comes to ahrefs remotes and sockets and even for 50 megahertz so obviously the the RF which can only learn a few of them and then it why not even work for some of the stuff or might not probably work for some of the stuff so I think this even though it looks like it will give us for this particular wall socket it can only switch on the first one and cannot switch on any of the others and cannot even switch them off so that didn't work for this particular RF bridge and I think that's going to be a problem when you start purchasing these RF ones because even if you start reading the listings it wouldn't really say too much about like you know what would be the protocol that is supported and you wouldn't even know what protocols are supported by the RF bridge but fortunately these devices are usually cheap so just buy one you try that if it doesn't work well you can try returning it or just buy another different model the next thing I want to show you is how you can combine the RF bridge with some of your son of devices using the scenes and what I'm going to set up a scenario where I have this door sensor and when this door sensor opens it's going to turn on one of the lights so for this we go into the scenes and we are going to create a new scene and I'm going to call this door sensor and so the condition is that when something happens on the such sorry on the RF breach so I in the condition I say master device and RF breach and as you can see here even though I have quite a few devices up in the RF which I can only see their arm once so I can see the PIR sensor and the door sensor so you I select our sensor and as you can see there is no on or off in the in any of these sensors because they basically just send a signal that I detected motion I detected the door opening I press the button so you can only create scenes like that so when the door sensor sends a signal then I want to for example turn on my touch and that's the scene ok it's that it successfully so let's test it and it works there is a little bit of delay but it works because the the sensor only sends a signal when the the door contact has opened now the light is on and it's not going to turn off so of course you can turn the lights off by going into the devices and switching it off which is here or as we have learned previously you can use this loop timer and set up something like let's say five minutes off and that's today probably can be moving into the past so you can set up the five the loop timer like this what you can see in the screen and that will automatically switch off the light after five minutes so now it becomes like a motion-activated or in this case a door activated light which is going to turn on when this signal is received from the RF device and it will turn automatically off after five minutes maybe we can just carry on and we will see this happen the other thing I wanted to do and the other thing I want to show you is how I can use the remote to actually operate another son of device and that again would be quite useful if we are trying to do something if we are trying to create a replacement for the son of as I said again let's say you don't have neutral so you can't use these mains some off touch so you might want to use an RF one and for the RF switch I'm going to use this key fob which has four buttons so I'm going to use the two top buttons to control the son of basic I haven't had this with the RF three so let me do that first so I'm going to add new device and because we have seen that we can't use the buttons in the scenes I'm going to create this key fob as an alarm so I'm going to say alarm and I'm going to press pairing press number one and I'm going to rename it okay so I'm just going to rename it button a okay and now I want to add the the second button which is button B and when I click L RF remote it says that this RF bridge only supports up to four devices so unfortunately I have to delete something so let's say I'm going to delete the PRI sensor because it works the same way as the door sensor so okay I'm going to add and it's going to be alarm again and then let's hope see that's train okay we cook a trained call number code for button B B okay so we are done so we have two your arms and actually if I press button a of if I press button B you can see that it receives and recognizes these signals so but you are not going to use it right here we are going to go to scenes and then I'm going to create a new scene so I'm just going to call this button a as well and then in the criteria if I select the RF bridge and button a and the perform action is going to be basic on so that's button a is going to turn on basic on and I'm going to create another one button B and our average button B and the action is going to be to turn basic off okay we have created these scenes so if I press number a basic comes on if I press be the basic goes off so with this method I can control any son of device using a key fob which is configured as an alarm and by the way five minutes has passed so you can say as you can see the Tompa the touch has turned off the other example I want to show you is combining different RF devices so for example I have I bought this general-purpose remote which it just has eight buttons and I've also bought this really really cheap relay board which contains an RF receiver and the relay and these units they usually have a pairing button so there is a button so you just press that button and after that it learns the signal so for example I trained these receiver unit to receive or to trigger on number one button from this remote so you can see that if I press number one then I can trigger this every day so now I have used this really cheap device to listen to this button and I can actually do the same using the RF link again because I only I can only have four devices I'm just going to delete this one and I'm going to create and I'm just going to create this as a one-button device so RF remote and I'm going to train button number one as I said you in some cases you might have to press it twice so the the receiver still works and then listens to button number one but now I can send the same signal from my RF reach as well by clicking on the button from the India b-negative sorry I press the button for too long let me just do the training again but as you can see I'm clicking the button and this relay responds to the signal which is not sent by the RF bridge and by the way this particular relay has different modes so it has toggle mode and then it also has latch modes but the default mode is that it only trips the relay when the when the signal is sent so actually this would be an ideal candidate for a garage door opener when you only need to send a short pulse that will be the cheapest possible option for a garage door opener which can be controlled from the invading application of course you can rename this maybe I relive this as well - garage and before you ask I want to show you that you can use the scenes to also control RF devices not just the other way around so I'm going to create a new scene and then I'm going to call this garage you will see why and what I will try to do is to use the t1 to control these RF switch done here so the condition is that when I run the t1 gang and let's say when the first channel is on sorry let's do channel let's do channel let's do channel 1 is on then I want to do something in the RF bridge and now you can see that execution only works on button type devices in the RF Bridge so trigger only works on alarm type the execution only works on button types so I only have one button which is this garage and both the device as in the remote and the button is also called garage that's why you see Garage twice but that's it ok so when the channel sorry Wendy channel 1 on T t1 is turned on it's going to turn on the relay so let's see how it looks I can do it physically but I can do it in the app as well come on and it works the light came on and then the relay also came in momentarily I'm guessing that's what probably not the best use case scenario for this one but you can see that the the scenes can control RF devices and some of devices and vice-versa in the beginning of the video we skipped over some of the functions that are available in the RF reach itself so when you open up the RF reach you see the devices you have this Condor and you have the schedule and you also have the loop timer which we have seen but now since we have some devices configured we can show how it works and if I do if I want to create a new condom the first question is what is the what is the device and again these this function only works on button type devices so I now have the garage so I can create a a timer so when I start this timer it will send out a signal like a garage signal in this case I can make the RF bridge to send out a garage signal after 30 minutes so it's pretty much how it works for our devices of course when when you are doing it the same thing like count timers for a solo for a th one or any of the other wireless devices you can also specify that early it needs to go on or off at that particular time here in in the RF room because we are just sending out the same signals you can just send out the signal so and the device would decide how it reacts to that signal and pretty much it works the same for the schedule as well so here I have the garage schedule so I mean again this is a stupid example but because I can you know have the garage to open and close automatically at the same time but again if this would controller relay like this one what not this one because this didn't particularly work but other relays then you can train the own button and you can train the off button and you can have schedules created when that RF device would turn on or turn off so again you can use the e V link to set up some you know basic scheduling functions for old RF main sockets I'm not going to say this because I guess you get the idea now and the loop timer works exactly the same way so before you set up the loop timer first it was going to ask for the device that you want to set up but the setup stage looks exactly what it looks for all the other devices again you don't have the option to set on and off because you are just sending out a signal that is my RF link review in a nutshell in summary RF bridges device which allows you to control your wireless devices your regular sum of devices and RF devices vice-versa probably the biggest drawback of this particular unit is that it can only control up to four devices on our memorize four devices but it comes to sensors motion sensors door sensors you can only have up to four so if you want to use the Sun off to set up an alarm system where you would have more than eight sensors PIR sensors or door sensors you would need to purchase multiple RF units I hope you found this video useful if you have other use cases in mind leave a message down in the comment section thanks for watching and hopefully see in the next video

Channel: Csongor Varga

Views: 182,495

Rating: 4.7602086 out of 5

Keywords: sonoff, itead, rf bridge

Id: JP1X4wOjlTk

Length: 29min 28sec (1768 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2018