Hardware

@Dwalt said: I have not had problems with enclosures per se, but I have seen temperature differentials due to locations exposed to direct sunlight and up against thermal masses such as a external walls or internal walls with enclosed heating ducts or hot water piping. I have four sensebenders in vented enclosures mounted on interior walls and have no problem with their accuracy. They are also loosely mounted inside their enclosures which may help them avoiding picking up heat from the walls. Overall, they seem much more consistent and accurate than the several DHT or Dallas sensors I have in my system. Thanks for the reply, perhaps my issue stems from my enclosures being mostly sealed. No venting what so ever. I did a quick test of a few of my sensors, opening the boxes and letting them sit in open air and the differentials came down substantially. Will look in to adding some venting!

Finally began tinkering with the boards I ordered a couple of months ago. Built 2, using regulated 5V. Both tell me they cannot init radio. I have yet to pull out the multimeter and begin diagnosing, but wanted to post up and see if anyone else has experienced this? I have not actually come across this error before with MySensors. I did solder pin 1 and 2 on the two pads, attached a 5v to 3.3 volt step down, cap in the slot direct above the radio. Blanking on what could be wrong, other than something witht he baords I received.

Check the bmp180. Its a presure sensor, but it includes a fairly accurate temperature sensor and is rated down to 1.8v.

On my 5V minis, the 16mhz crystal is much larger (long silver oval component stamped 16.00) than on 3.3v. At least on mine.

@awi @Sparkman Thanks guys, will implement these and see how it goes

Okay, it appears to be working now as advertised with only power from the USB connector, but I believe that the board has an intermittent connection on it. I can't see any solder joints that look suspect, so most likely it's one of the esp8266 pins.I will just have to handle it delicately. Thanks for the help.

@scalz: good tip! I prefer to triple check before committing to a pcbmaker.

@johnr Cool! I will try and get back here with my findings :) Tnx!

hi Andreas, if you change your dimension in EAGLE then OSHPark and others will cut the PCB in that form. But you can also just define a "keep out" area with a polygon. The capacitor seems OK to me. All 100nF I have are 2.54mm pitch. My 10uF capacitor is 5mm diameter (8mm high), the 100uF is 7mm diameter (12mm high). I am not familiar with 3mm duo-leds. I live in Wilrijk, south of Antwerpen (Belgium), but I spent some time on other continents and even three months in Munchen as a student working in the research facilities of Siemens in Neu Perlach. I'm assuming you live in Germany. Gert

@Zeph and @rvendrame thanx for claryfing things. I'll just have to build up a test circuit on a breadboard. I'll start with adding the 2.2 uf as specified in the datasheet and keep the radio wires short and will see from there. The specs of the LE33 are very promising, so I'm hoping to get this to work. At the moment I've setup a lot of sensors on breadboards. The 4.7 uf cap is 20cm away from the radio, but no problems so far.

@Steve-Caster read this and in fact the whole article.. ;-)

Hi Dwalt en Mikke, Thank you for your input/information. Based on your input I think that I can make a quick start!!! :-) Best regards, hans

I think what ericvdb said with the IR sensors is probably close to the best solution. If you figure out a way to count people at each doorway you could do a sudo presence detection. So, if you count people as they enter, and at each threshold remove a person from the room they are leaving and add to the one they are going to you should have something that is rather accurate. This could have issues if you carry someone from one room to another, but you could add pir to rooms to correct exceptions. Something along the lines of, you carry someone into the living room, it counts one person there, you go to kitchen, it reduces to 0 and turns off lights, but you have an exception that if there is motion and zero people it changes to one person in the room. Would just have to be sure your hvac does not set of the pir.

@punter9 Given it's a 5 volt module, powering it with 9V is not a good idea. The specs on the Songle relay indicate that it draws about 90mA. The official Nano has a 500mA 5V regulator so if you don't have too much else connected, that should be fine. If you are using a Nano clone, then take a look at the specs for the regulator it uses. Cheers Al

@BartE Thanks for that. My issue ended up being with the signal lead from the sensor to the arduino. A bad connector. Your advice on the pull-up resistor was very useful. Thanks

@Anticimex said: @Oitzu it should work just fine. Thanks. Ordered this. :+1:

thanks for the clarification. I'm not going to use the regulator at all, as I'm powering the whole setup with a HLK-PM01 (when it finally arrives).