With debug on I can conform it works just fine. So far I can see all sensors reporting and all actuators respond without any problems. Accept for one, but that radio is in a cage of Faraday and I knew it would need a repeater close by.
Next step making the shield for the rfm69, so that I have one form factor for my Gateways and Repeater(s). But it has to wait until after Eastern. as it's the same for adding an extra decoupler capacitor.
I still think it's the radio or more precise the decoupling circuit. I have seen simulor behavior on a node. Almost as if the cap is not charging fast enough. If I ever have time all add a 47uf cap in parallel and a 0.1uf. As the last one is not in the regulator circuit. I'm not convinced raising the capacitor value is the solution.
As a software engineer by education - which was a long time ago haha - I'm not fund in adding delays. But if it helps it helps.
Since it works with my PA + LNA antenna on High PA Level, I've decided to take it in production. I've kept my old Gateway just in case. Photo's will follow soon.
PA Level Max might work if you provided a power supply on the DC barrel input. But I will test it later as the Uno requires 7.5V and I'm not sure if my voltage regulator will become hot like it did with a 12V power supply. For Now I'll let the current setup run for a couple of days.
Just a question, maybe @mfalkvidd knows. I turned off MyDebug in a test Gateway and it seems to work. I think it makes sense but I wanted to check. Because the gateway will become faster if the additional debug isn't needed. It saves a log entry per message send/received.
But as I discovered, if i turn off debug the cap on my radio isn't good anymore. It's 100uf tantalum smd cap. When I turn the debug off, nodes have a hard time connecting to the gateway with a lot of errors.
So question number 2, is a 100uf cap good enough for a NRF24L01+ PA LNA? I might investigate any further after Eastern weekend. For now I keep it as a 2nd Gateway and keep testing it. As I don't have the time now to solve issues when I use it as a production Gateway.
Thanx
ps. I guess you'll miss some additional logging info in you're Home Automation system. But is it really needed?
Awesome project!
Added an update.
@mfalkvidd do you know the answer to this?
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