General Discussion

There are more messages than just the presentation messages that don't show in the HA logs, like find parent. You should check the actual GW debug output when this situation occurs to see them. This would be really necessary if you ask me, otherwise it can't be seen what happens to the gw to make it hang.

Hello Thanks it worked -- with mock sensor sketch for now. I think I should be able to use this in production. :-) Cheers Puneit

Quite a large number of inexpensive nRF51/nRF52832 watches which appear to have already been hacked, documented, and made available for others to now hack too: https://github.com/curtpw/nRF5x-device-reverse-engineering

@NeverDie Nah, I'm fine. It's always helpful to get opinions and views from others, especially if they are more experienced in the matter, if only to set one's own viewpoint straight. I'm grateful for all you guys replies, but I don't feel like bothering Microchip with this. Regarding Nordic - besides the circulating copies / clones (like the SI24R1), I guess it's also not helping that they are fabless, unlike Atmel / Microchip, in which case it seems totally reasonable that the various fabs may have slight marking variations. I just didn't expect that from those ATmegas which seem to have been produced in one and the same factory. But it's certainly a neat touch from Nordic to offer a free test.

@Boots33 Thanks a lot for the quick response. I now have my Nano running as a serial gateway and it is connected via a USB cable directly to my controller (Raspberry Pi 4 running Home Assistant / Hass.io). I added a local motion sensor to the Nano gateway HW and pasted the mysensors MotionSensor example code to the setup(), presentation() and loop() functions as well as to the definitions in the top of the GatewaySerial example code. I disabled the radio definitions as I currently have no radio capability in my gateway (not sure if this was necessary). In Home Assistant / Hass.io I updated the configuration.yaml with the following text (as described on the Home Assistant integration help): mysensors: gateways: - device: '/dev/ttyUSB0' And it works :) In Home Assistant Developer Tools under States I can now see my motion sensor go on and off by the flick of my hand. I had expected a bit more bumps on the road just to get this far, but wow - I am obviously walking in the foot prints of people who have worked hard to make it easy for the rest of us. I am sure I will hit bumps on the way when the radios have to send results to the gateway (thick concrete walls with lots of steel), but for now I will enjoy this big success. Thanks again Boots33

PS: one downside will probably be not being able to wake up programmatically and double the node as a e.g. temperature / climate sensor, as I had in mind. Sorry for the confusion above, too little sleep in the last days (at least I hope that explains it :-) ) Perhaps @Yveaux can help here on how to combine pin change interrupts and timer wake into a successful sleep() command? So far it looks like that would be possible with Low-Power lib, but this is not compiling in conjunction with MySensors 2.3.2.

Thanks for the replies. I think I will just go with 3 sensors per raised bed, per nano. That will keep the runs under 10'

I use RFM69HW 433 MHz with a wire antenna (straight or spiral). When I start to test my devices, I had a range of about 100 - 150 m (transmitter in my house, receiver outside), so it was very good result for me. Unfortunately, after building the nodes, now I have the stable range less than 10 m inside my house :( (I use maximum MY_RFM69_MAX_POWER_LEVEL_DBM (20)). Sometimes it is better, sometimes worse, it depends on various conditions. Congratulations on such good results of your gateway, but I'm afraid that stable transmition will be much smaller.

@tekka I moved the library and reinstalled. The sketch works now. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction!

@skywatch said in Which vector network analyzer should we buy?: It will be interesting to see the reviews of the new unit though..... Big discussion was at https://groups.io/g/nanovna-users/topic/first_pcb_pictures_of_the_v2/68761814. Now it seem continued to the https://groups.io/g/nanovna-users/topic/v2_design/71480430. These topics also explain why some shielding wasn't installed. Please note, there is also the NanoVNA2 by edy555, but the name has been taken.

@Nca78 Agree. But I liked the idea of a simple text search, where you enter for example 'MOSFET' and it lights up all bins with mosfets ... It is now in my list 'projects to investigate after finishing all ongoing' ;-)

@scalz said in Serial gateway running on coin cells. Needs to sleep: also forget bad coincell brands, not good at all for lifetime. This is my biggest concern at the moment. With the watch device I can resort to Lipo and recharge if needed, but the sender is best encased in silicone to protect it so its crucial that I get a long reliable battery life from it. My only option there is to use inductive charging. Which might be easy but I've not looked at the details. I would also need to do shipping safety sheets if I use lipo but I think that it's probably just an expense. Not a project risk.

OP has surely decided and built his new home by now, but for other's that are deciding for KNX or Loxone wired smart home, this might be useful. I'm not affiliated with each of those companies so my thoughts are unbiased. Firstly, let’s emphasize that you can hardly go wrong selecting either KNX or Loxone home automation ecosystem. But what are the pros and cons of each? https://www.1home.io/blog/loxone-or-knx/

Thank you all for the advice! I will try first with log2ram, but for long term I want to install an SSD. A nice week to all!

That is the direction I am going but this is the only tutorial I could find that used the NRF24L01+ radios to send data to Home Assistant. For now, I am just trying to get it to send accurate measurements and move to capacitive sensors as soon as I figure out how to send the data via NRF24L01+

@Dreded Thank you for your encouragement, I would not fail to contact you for any explanations as simple as you described it.