What is obi_energy_tracker_local_cloud?

This project is a full reverse engineering writeup and self hosting toolkit for the OBI energy tracking system, a commercial product sold under the heyOBI brand that reads your home electricity meter and sends the data to the manufacturer's cloud. The system has three parts: a small reader device that clips onto your meter and talks over LoRa radio, a WiFi and Bluetooth bridge that relays that data onward, and the vendor's cloud service that receives it. This repository documents exactly how those three parts talk to each other, so that owners of the hardware can point it at their own server instead of the vendor's. The repo explains the radio and network protocols involved: how the reader decodes standard electricity meter data formats, how it forwards readings to the bridge over 868 MHz LoRa radio, and how the bridge then sends everything to the cloud over an encrypted MQTT connection, the same kind of setup used by many commercial AWS-connected IoT devices. It also documents the Bluetooth protocol a phone app would use to configure the bridge. The main practical outcome offered is a complete open source replacement firmware for the bridge itself, found in a subfolder of the project. This firmware can be installed onto the original bridge hardware over the air, without opening the device or needing special tools, since the original bootloader is locked down. Once installed, it talks to the meter readers directly, decodes the energy data itself, and offers a local web dashboard showing live power usage plus history, along with MQTT support that integrates with Home Assistant, all without ever contacting the manufacturer's cloud. The same firmware also runs on generic, off the shelf ESP32 hardware paired with a compatible radio chip, not just the original device. The author is explicit that all example keys, certificates, and device IDs in the repository are placeholders, and that the project is meant only for use on hardware the reader already owns, not for targeting the vendor's live service.