Pronunciation: "Pro-tee-aht"
Lightweight, deterministic 433MHz IoT RF protocol with MQTT transparent bridging and busy bit collision avoidance.
ProtIoT is a simple, practical RF protocol for home lab and small-scale IoT deployments. It connects battery-powered sensors and relay endpoints to an MQTT broker via a rack-mounted Linux base station — without WiFi, without cloud dependency, without complexity.
Key characteristics:
- Deterministic channel access via busy bit collision avoidance
- MQTT transparent — Node-RED and other MQTT clients see no difference between a WiFi device and a ProtIoT RF endpoint
- Low power endpoints — ATtiny85 sensor nodes on a CR2032 coin cell
- Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) forward error correction
- Star topology — base station is the network authority
- KISS — no mesh, no cloud, no bloat
The busy bit collision avoidance scheme at the core of ProtIoT is derived from a real-world RF data network deployed at Federal Express. That network coordinated 80,000 field terminals nationwide on a private RF infrastructure using Motorola MICOR and SYNTOR repeaters. The original protocol was implemented on a Motorola 6809 processor. ProtIoT modernizes those proven concepts for contemporary IoT hardware.
Base Station:
- Raspberry Pi 3 running DietPi
- Dual CC1101 PA+LNA modules — full duplex TX/RX
- W5500 hardwired Ethernet — no WiFi
- Connects to existing MQTT broker (Mosquitto)
Endpoints:
- ATtiny85 — low power sensors (reed switch, temp, door/window) on coin cell
- ATmega328P — mains powered relay/actuator nodes
- All programmed via AVRISP mkII
Protocol: v0.1 Draft
Hardware: Design phase
Software: Not yet started
| Document | Description |
|---|---|
| ProtIoT_v0.1.md | Full protocol specification |
| Repo | Description |
|---|---|
| suit-cam | WiFi Pineapple Nano clone fix |
W. Smith (@w35m17h)
Developed with assistance from Claude (Anthropic).