Reverse Engineering And Self-Internet hosting The OBI Good Power Tracker

Offered by German DIY retailer OBI, the OBI Power Tracker is a €15 set of two gadgets, one among which you primarily stick on high of your current electrical energy meter. This then permits for electrical energy utilization to be measured and tracked, with the info despatched to the second, gateway gadget. This latter cloud-bound gadget is linked to an OBI account by way of the heyOBI app. This correspondingly referred to as for the gateway gadget to be reverse-engineered and free of its cloud-based shackles, a process that [Aaron Christophel] fortunately took upon himself.

The entire course of can also be lined in two movies, with the primary offering all of the necessities on reprovisioning the unique firmware for an area MQTT server in English, whereas the second, German-language video focuses on customized firmware for the ESP32-C3 inside the gateway gadget.

Contained in the reader gadget is a Cortex-M0+-based BAT32G135 MCU that communicates with the meter by way of its IR protocol. That is then communicated by way of 868 MHz LoRa to the gateway gadget that will likely be positioned someplace inside Wi-Fi attain by the consumer. Inside this latter gadget is as talked about the ESP32-C3, which by default runs firmware that communicates by way of safe MQTT with an AWS cloud occasion for the everyday cloud-based shenanigans.

The aforementioned reprovisioning possibility doesn’t require firmware flashing, only a handful of steps to observe. This entails fetching the 32-bit TEA key, producing your individual PKI, operating your individual MQTTS-capable dealer and having the supplied Python script deal with the remainder from there.

Flashing customized firmware is the different possibility, with simple UART/JTAG reflashing sadly disabled by the producer. With the trouble required right here you possibly can maybe argue that merely connecting the reader gadget to a customized gateway gadget is likely to be rather a lot simpler, particularly if you have already got a LoRa transceiver and related {hardware}.