There are some resources online for getting the Airthings Wave Plus to communicate with your Raspberry Pi and Openhab. The first article is from Airthings and is a bit out of date but a very good starting point. The find_wave.py script they refer to is no longer on their site but I found it at https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/4406702/Tech/find_wave.py.
This all takes us down a rabbit hole of python 2.7 lack of current support. “sudo apt-get install python-2” got the proper version of Python itself installed but that still leaves some dependencies missing. I found a note on installing the no longer supported version of pip for Python 2.7 for Raspbian Bullseye.
sudo curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/pip/2.7/get-pip.py --output get-pip.py
sudo python2 get-pip.py
However, I was still not able to get bluepy installed for Python 2.7.
So now we try to adapt the script for Python 3. Not too bad, we need parenthesis for the print statements/functions. Once the syntax was correct my first run “sudo python3 find_wave.py” or “sudo blescan” rewarded me with the error message:
BTLEManagementError(“Failed to execute management command ‘%s'” % (cmd), rsp)
“bluetoothctl power off” followed by “bluetoothctl power on” seems to resolve the issue. There is quite a bit of discussion on this error on github.
Once we got find_wave.py working it was time to try read_waveplus.py. Once again this is written for Python 2.7 but a quick fixup of all of the print statements got it working for Python 3.
~/waveplus-reader $ sudo python3 read_waveplus.py 2930165120 5
Press ctrl+C to exit program
Device serial number: 2930165120
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? Humidity ? Radon ST avg ? Radon LT avg ? Temperature ? Pressure ? CO2 level ? VOC level ?
??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
? 34.0 %rH ? 74 Bq/m3 ? 74 Bq/m3 ? 19.43 degC ? 977.64 hPa ? 546.0 ppm ? 46.0 ppb ?
? 34.0 %rH ? 74 Bq/m3 ? 74 Bq/m3 ? 19.43 degC ? 977.64 hPa ? 546.0 ppm ? 46.0 ppb ?
? 34.0 %rH ? 74 Bq/m3 ? 74 Bq/m3 ? 19.43 degC ? 977.64 hPa ? 546.0 ppm ? 46.0 ppb ?
There are lots of folks who have various version of Airthings to MQTT. There is even a nifty ESP32 gateway project. But the project that interested me most for the Pi also creates a mini dashboard and was recommended in the Openhab forums.
For now the Openhab Bluetooth binding extension is working. If issues develop the MQTT gateway will probably be the solution.
UPDATE(July 2024): after updating the Pi to Bookworm bluepy was no longer installed. Currently it is not available as a Debian python3-xxx package and it considered an externally-managed-environment by pip3. This means sudo pip3 install bluepy will fail. There are a couple of choice to work around this. The recommended method is to create a virtual environment and install there. If I had the patience and time I would have chosen this path. Instead I chose the --break-system-packages route. This option will allow you to install into the global python environment with pip3.
sudo pip3 install bluepy --break-system-packagesIn my situation this was expedient.