Support of RTL-SDR V4 Dongle and its drivers

[Milvus11]

Type of request

Enhancement

OS version

Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit legacy lite

wmbusmeters version

wmbusmeters: 1.16.1-27-gd90dbb1 d90dbb1

Your message goes here

Hey,
first of all, sorry if the quesiton is silly, I am a newbie. I bought an RTL-SDR V4, installed the wmbusmeters and tried for weeks to receive any message from my Techems. Today I think I found the issue: The rtl-sdr driver does not work for the RTL-SDR V4 as I found out on the support page:

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/v4/

However, today I tried to follow the steps mentioned by that page to install the correct driver. Problem is, when trying to run wmbusmeters, that when inserting

"tail -f /var/log/wmbusmeters/wmbusmeters.log"

i get:

[2024-04-19_19:58:32] (rtlwmbus) error: when starting as daemon, wmbusmeters looked for /rtl_sdr and /usr/bin/rtl_sdr, but found neither!

The new driver files are installed in another folder, how can I manage to tell wmbusmeters?

To clarify, what I did, here are the commands I used to install everything:

1  sudo apt update
   2  sudo apt upgrade -y
   3  sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev git cmake pkg-config
   4  git clone https://github.com/rtlsdrblog/rtl-sdr-blog
   5  cd rtl-sdr-blog
   6  mkdir build
   7  cd build
   8  cmake ../ -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON
   9  make
  10  sudo make install
  11  sudo cp ../rtl-sdr.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/
  12  sudo ldconfig
  13  cd
  14  git clone https://github.com/weetmuts/wmbusmeters.git
  15  cd wmbusmeters
  16  make
  17  cd
  18  ls
  19  sudo rm -r wmbusmeters
  20  git clone https://github.com/wmbusmeters/wmbusmeters.git
  21  cd wmbusmeters
  22  make
  23  cd
  24  sudo apt install -y libxml2-dev
  25  git clone https://github.com/wmbusmeters/wmbusmeters.git
  26  cd wmbusmeters
  27  make
  28  cd
  29  ls
  30  sudo rm -r wmbusmeters
  31  git clone https://github.com/wmbusmeters/wmbusmeters.git
  32  cd wmbusmeters
  33  make
  34  sudo make install
  35  cd
  36  sudo nano /etc/wmbusmeters.conf
  37  sudo systemctl daemon-reload
  38  sudo systemctl enable wmbusmeters.service
  39  sudo systemctl start wmbusmeters.service
  40  sudo systemctl status wmbusmeters.service
  41  history
  42  sudo systemctl status wmbusmeters.service
  43  tail -f /var/log/wmbusmeters/wmbusmeters.log
  44  git clone https://github.com/xaelsouth/rtl-wmbus.git
  45  cd rtl-wmbus
  46  make
  47  sudo make install
  48  sudo reboot
  49  tail -f /var/log/wmbusmeters/wmbusmeters.log

if you could help me out, I'd really appreciate it

[BIBO]

Hi,
Firstly test if your installation detects dongle /usr/local/bin/rtl_test -t, if it works then you can use device=rtlwmbus:CMD(/usr/local/bin/rtl_sdr -f 868.95M -s 1600000 - 2>/dev/null | rtl_wmbus -p s -a -f) in configuration and everything should work.
There are other approaches also to fix your issue - wmbusmeters is looking for rtl_sdr either in $PATH or in /usr/bin/, so you can add /usr/local/bin/ to $PATH or add symlink to /usr/bin/ or copy or move to /usr/bin/ or recompile and set proper installation directory - cmake ../ -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr.

[Milvus11]

Thank you for your response! It worked! I tried kind of everything you suggested, but now I get files coming in!! To make the path clear also to maybe other people struggling, I tell, what I did:

Following your stepts I got the following output:

/usr/local/bin/rtl_test -t
Found 1 device(s):
  0:  RTLSDRBlog, Blog V4, SN: 00000001

Using device 0: Generic RTL2832U OEM

Kernel driver is active, or device is claimed by second instance of librtlsdr.
In the first case, please either detach or blacklist the kernel module
(dvb_usb_rtl28xxu), or enable automatic detaching at compile time.

usb_claim_interface error -6
Failed to open rtlsdr device #0.

so I did:

1. blacklisting:
   sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/no-rtl.conf

entering: blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu

then unload the driver

lsmod | grep dvb_usb_rtl28xxu

 lsmod | grep rtl
lsmod | grep dvb
rtl2832_sdr            24576  0
rtl2832                20480  1
i2c_mux                16384  1 rtl2832
regmap_i2c             16384  1 rtl2832
dvb_usb_rtl28xxu       32768  1
dvb_usb_v2             28672  1 dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
dvb_core              126976  2 dvb_usb_v2,rtl2832
videobuf2_vmalloc      16384  2 rtl2832_sdr,bcm2835_v4l2
videobuf2_v4l2         32768  5 rtl2832_sdr,bcm2835_codec,bcm2835_v4l2,v4l2_mem2mem,bcm2835_isp
videobuf2_common       69632  9 rtl2832_sdr,bcm2835_codec,videobuf2_vmalloc,videobuf2_dma_contig,videobuf2_v4l2,bcm2835_v4l2,v4l2_mem2mem,videobuf2_memops,bcm2835_isp
videodev              274432  7 rtl2832_sdr,bcm2835_codec,videobuf2_v4l2,bcm2835_v4l2,videobuf2_common,v4l2_mem2mem,bcm2835_isp
dvb_usb_rtl28xxu       32768  1
dvb_usb_v2             28672  1 dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
dvb_core              126976  2 dvb_usb_v2,rtl2832
mc                     61440  8 videodev,bcm2835_codec,dvb_usb_v2,videobuf2_v4l2,dvb_core,videobuf2_common,v4l2_mem2mem,bcm2835_isp

sudo rmmod dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
sudo rmmod dvb_usb_v2
sudo rmmod rtl2832
sudo rmmod rtl2832_sdr
sudo rmmod rtl2832

/usr/local/bin/rtl_test -t

And then tried do configure what you mentioned:

sudo nano wmbusmeters.conf

device=rtlwmbus:CMD(/usr/local/bin/rtl_sdr -f 868.95M -s 1600000 - 2>/dev/null | rtl_wmbus -p s -a -f)

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin' >> ~/.bashrc

 sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/rtl_sdr /usr/bin/rtl_sdr
  sudo systemctl restart wmbusmeters.service
 sudo systemctl status wmbusmeters.service

And it worked! I am pretty sure I did a lot wrong now, but I receive telegrams every minute and quite a lot, so somehow it works now!

I am so grateful and reliefed, thank you so much. I guess I got to make an image of my raspi sd now, cause as I don't have a full reliable manual, I would never get it running again..

thanks again!!