ENER002-2PI Remote Control sockets with Raspberry Pi Controller Board - White

Excellent piece of kit for anyone looking to do a project with a raspberry pi. Very simple setup, just insert the radio receiver into your raspberry pi, following the few instructions on Energenie's site and you're up and running.I'm using my remote control sockets to schedule a grow light for a hydroponics garden. Works excellently, and very simple to script too. Connected to an API to get the time sunset and sunrise is, and while the sun is down the switch is turned on to power the light. Makes automating effortless pretty much. I haven't had to touch the code nor the switch for the light since it's been set up for a little over 2~3 months at the time of this review.

The possibilities are endless; you just need to use your imagination a bit and be aware of its limitations.I have used it to automate power for 2 oil heaters in the conservatory. The thermostats on them are not that good, and they keep switching on even during the summer months when the conservatory is basically a green house (reaching temperatures of around 30 degrees C etc). So they are switching on when they really don't need to, increasing my energy bill unnecessarily.With the use of the Pi, running Python, specifically, the Python "ephem" module (which allows you to do astronomical calculations) along with the Python "energenie" module, throwing some timezone calls into the mix, I have written a little script that runs every 10 minutes which calculates, based on my longitude, latitude and time of day, the sunrise and sunset times for the current day which allows it to then determine through simple logic if it should send an ON or OFF signal to the sockets (I want the heaters ON during the night and OFF during daylight). And it works perfectly.This is going to save my energy bill being unnecessarily high now for the rest of the year, because it really is only activating the heaters when required, and also doing it based on mathematical calculations, not relying on any light-sensitive switching equipment which is prone to messing up if someone switches on the lights during the night or indeed having to deal with cheap light-sensitive units that just don't work well due to poor manufacturing or design processes.Only bad points are that the range is not as high as I expected; I have had to move the Pi into the conservatory for the signal to reach the sockets (not a huge problem). I was expecting the signal to reach the sockets from two rooms away in the living room, through two walls, but this hasn't been possible. Also, sometimes the sockets fail to register the signal and do not switch, which is why I have had to run my script every 10 minutes regardless. If it was more reliable, I would have implemented this solution to only send two signals a day (OFF at sunrise and ON at sunset).Brilliant product and very pleased customer.NOTE: I would NOT use these for mission critical applications as anyone could potentially send a signal to your sockets and switch them ON or OFF at will. In my case, the sockets are only controlling a couple of heaters so I am not bothered by this. There are alternative, more advanced, units available which are able to hook on to your wireless network which allow for more secure control if you need to go down that route.UPDATE: As for the range, the documentation does state that this can be increased by soldering a 13.5cm length of copper wire onto the Pi-mote board (there is a little antenna hole marked for this purpose). So for people who want to drastically increase the range of the device, this DIY modification will need to be performed.FURTHER UPDATE: I experienced reliability issues with the sockets not switching and called Energenie directly to enquire what they thought. They offered a full product swap with RMA of the units from Amazon. After further testing with a new RF board, I have indeed had to solder a 13.5cm antenna to it to resolve my problems and have found one of the 4 sockets (from both my original Amazon kit and the replacement kit Energenie sent out) faulty as I could not get it to learn the transmitter signal. I suspect the lack of antenna wire was causing failures for the sockets to properly learn the transmitter signal on my original setup. I am now returning the RF board from Amazon along with 2 sockets (one of them suspected faulty) to Energenie as part of their RMA package.I now find that the reliability of the socket switching is 100% whereas before it was unreliable and sometimes did not work at all. So, if you are having reliability issues, definitely try the 13.5cm wire hack for the antenna (and also re-train the sockets after applying the antenna) and definitely contact Energenie directly so they can send you more sockets as some do not appear to be reliably manufactured. I cannot fault their customer care and support regarding these issues. Brilliant customer service!

Instead of the Pi radio transmitter described, this product came with an IR transmitter to control the sockets. The individual components in this box are therefore incompatible.Another review was left on here in December 2015 with the same problem, and they obviously have not addressed it in 4 months. Poor show.

Even with the addition of the extra antenna (which the manufacturer really should supply) I found these to be be pretty unreliable even when the receiving sockets were in the same room as the transmitter. I have a set of manual remote control sockets which seem to work on the same underlying technology and are 100% reliable at much further distances so I don't understand why these perform so poorly. Furthermore, one of the sockets switches off at random.

The components are build well. The Raspberry Pi module fits nicely and doesn't add much to the height, although it will probably stop the Pi from fitting into most standard cases.For beginners to home automation, or for basic/educational projects this would be great a great product, but for anything more serious the limitation of 4 groups will be a very quickly encountered issue, and since the board takes up the entire 26pin GPIO header of an RPi A/B board you'll have to work hard to get a second board working alongside.The Energenie system is broadcast only. This means that if you use the green buttons to turn the Energenie switches on/off the Raspberry Pi won't know, so it makes it hard to keep track of the state of the switch within an application.There are better solutions, such as a Z-Wave or LightwaveRF system with hub and APIs which don't have a limit on the number of devices. A broadcast-only alternative would be X10 which is a standard, has been around for decades and will support up to 16 groups. I haven't researched Raspberry Pi boards but I'd be surprised if there weren't several solutions.The variety of devices to go along with these is also lacking. The solution purely caters for on/off switch 'wall warts' and a power strip, so you'll be limited to desk lamps, etc. Ideally there would be at least dimmer switches and integrated wall sockets/light switches.The documentation for the board could have been better. There was a single Python example, but the 'pairing' process isn't adequately described in an explicit way that indicates that's what is happening. It took a few tries to get our switches paired. While converting the example into a Ruby gem wasn't difficult, I found the protocol used by the devices to be a little strange and although there was documentation about the data I'd need to pass, I ended up having to convert the Python code almost verbatim since the reasons for the sequence of events wasn't clearly described.