Hardware Contributor

@chbarg In all honesty, I think ZigBee is much older than mySensors. It's a pretty old standard. But it was very expensive to use, but since Philips and Ikea used it in their smart lightning it has become very cheap. Zigbee is used in commercial products, whereas my Sensors is just a nice and - more reliable - option for those who like to build their own stuff. I say more reliable, because the Ikea stuff I use is not always available. At least I have troubles with it. Also the batteries in the remotes drain really fast. Specially when attached to the gateway and night directly to a device

Hello @ANTaro, this is an ULN2003 stepper motor driver.

@feanor-anglin it really looks very interesting to me. And if I'd renovate my house or bought a new house. I'd go for wired for sure. I'm running my sensors with NRF24L01+ for over 7 years now. And I actually didn't notice any problem. It's very reliable, but I admit the radio is very picky on it's power. Most problems I ran into where all power related.

Why I've been absent for a long time has several personal reasons. I needed to finish a study I was following next to my job. And after I finished it I had some health issues. And when I decided to get back into it. My dad passed away. We're now cleaning out his workshop, he earned his living as an electronics repair man. I'm keeping the stuff I can use, like the Fluke meters - although they are 20 years old they still work good - his lab power supply and stuff like that. It's also to moment to redo my own workshop. Because the organization was completely lost. I ordered a lot of parts the last years but never took the time to store them.

So hopefully this will al be done and I can finally finish some of the projects that are laying on my desk for years

@feanor-anglin said in Where did everyone go?:

I just think such initiatives could meet with higher interest from everyone involved in the development of MySensors, because it would be mutually beneficial.

This is the first I've heard of your project, but I have no idea where it is. Maybe post a link to it? If you already have in some other thread, the problem is that not everyone reads every thread or tracks every post.

Hello @troost, I have no time to investigate your case (and without code, it would anyway be impossible), but maybe you can try my (basic) library for PM sensors here: https://github.com/Nca78/NcaPMSensorLight to see if you have a similar result with it.

I'm surprised just how much variance in mains voltage there can be over a 24 hours period. Here's a graph of Ting's log data from yesterday:

There's a difference of 11 volts between the low and the high voltage measurements. Also, there was a considerable dip in voltage overall between 3:30pm and 6:30pm, as you can see from the graph.

I referenced Kevin's board merely as an example. I'm sure lots of alternatives exist if you were to go looking for them.

@idanronen This: https://www.kevindarrah.com/wiki/index.php?title=TrigBoardV7
Not sure ifhe's using esp-now lately, but it would be an obvious match for his trig boards. Early on he was doing typical wi-fi connections through a router, which is obviously slow if having just awoken.

Lots of info here: https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/8735/cnc-pcb-milling?_=1624294898545 It's as close as you'll find to a complete walkthru.

Turnaround is faster than JLPCB (an hour vs days). Otherwise, I would agree. TL;DR: for rapid iteration, or you simply want something fast, DIY PCB's are hard to beat.

As to topicality, it's a subject not covered well on most other forums. CNC Zone has some posts, but that's about it.

All in all, the tools keep getting better, and it's easier now than before to find speciallized bits that make the work easier.

ESP-NOW is a peer-to-peer protocol that doesn't go through a wi-fi router, so it doesn't encounter the usual multi-second delay it might if it were waking up and reconnectig with a wi-fi access point first.

This guy gives a nice overview:
ESP-NOW | Getting Started With ESP8266 Including Demo Sketches – 10:34
— bitsNblobs Electronics

I would have preferred to see an implementation of wi-fi direct, which is similar in concept and which has had android support for about 10 years, but I'm not sure where to find modules that are easily wi-fi direct capable.

Anyhow, sleep current for ESP8266 and ESP32, the last time I checked anyway, was still kinda high, but I do wonder what the startup time would be if an ESP module were kept in a totally turned-off state until it was needed. Perhaps the higher transmit speed that is possible with a wifi PHY would allow high power to be used only briefly (~250ms in the example in the video), and so maybe total power consumed from the start of wake-up through the transmission may yet turn out to be a win?