Decoding the Airthings Wave Radon output

OK, so i ran the Airthings Wave for a few weeks, I ended up with an average of ~20-30Bq/m^3, which is below the Health Canada worry line of 200Bq/m^3. Now, its time to look at how to make this integrate with my Home Assistant. The device uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and is integrated via an app on the phone. I have ordered a BLE sniffer, but while I wait for that, I have decided to try the ‘hci snoop debug’ mode on Android. This outputs the HCI frames (in a way that wireshark can read?). On Android Nougat and later it does not output this as a separate file (/sdcard/bt_snoop.log), but instead puts it in the general ‘generate a bug report’ log. The method is in the code here. Inside the larger log file you get a chunk that looks like this:

--- BEGIN:BTSNOOP_LOG_SUMMARY (85476 bytes in) --- 
Anjfyi/RYQUAeJzlfQeQVUUT7tycN7M53CXDApIliwqKAU
/mvDqGYmhFDNZOYiOpc6D/DNKRHxfwA96/Oi
--- END:BTSNOOP_LOG_SUMMARY ---

You would be forgiven for thinking (like me) that this is uuencode. Its not. Going back to the code that generates it, it does:

printf(header)
push preamble to buffer
deflate buffer
base64 buffer
printf footer

OK, so it uses zlib. I should be able to rip the headers off, run it through base64 -d, and then run zlib-flate -uncompress, right? Sadly, that gives some error on the decompression.

And you would think this would be an obvious google search “android unpack bug report logs”. But I must be missing something. It must be this or this (btsnooz, see here). But that gives me the same error. Hmm.

Ah, i see, its this one here, btsnooz.py. Got it. And here is the file (and you can open this in wireshark) btsnoop. OK, who wants to help decode it? I unpaired, started capturing, paired, let it run for >1 hr to get a radon measurement, and dumped this file. You can see the two devices (Pixel 2 XL <-> TexasIns) talking.

OK, put on your peril-sensitive sunglasses, crack open that wireshark, and open the log file. Race you.


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Comments

7 Responses to “Decoding the Airthings Wave Radon output”

  1. Shaun

    We just purchased this. Looking for some way to make it work with HA on a Pi. Would be great if the current data can be fetched/sniffed. Hopefully it is possible!

    1. db

      so i attached some captures there.
      But i confess I put on the back-burner that integration.

  2. db

    Thanks for the pointer! will look.

  3. Vaibhav

    Hi there..
    I want to create Wireshark readable file from BTSNOOP_LOG_SUMMARY file. How to do this??
    I tried using btsnooz.py for this. But I am getting following error…

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “btsnooz.py”, line 142, in
    main()
    File “btsnooz.py”, line 133, in main
    decode_snooz(base64.standard_b64decode(base64_string))
    File “btsnooz.py”, line 74, in decode_snooz
    decode_snooz_v2(decompressed, last_timestamp_ms)
    File “btsnooz.py”, line 117, in decode_snooz_v2
    sys.stdout.write(struct.pack(‘>II’, packet_length, length))
    TypeError: write() argument must be str, not bytes

    What to do now??

    1. db

      i think(?) its because of using python3 and stronger type checking.
      i suspect its related to stdout not being in binary mode?
      there’s lots online for this error in general in python, one of those things will point you in the right direction i think.

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