Mod

@bcdaus my advise would be to try a larger capacitor. 100uf is working fine for me. Regarding to the differences in the projects. When I started out, 4.7uf was what most people used. But 10uf worked for all. If I'm not mistaking something has changed in the MS library years ago, which caused the radio to use a bit more power, but it made the communication better. So from that point on it is 100uf that most use. But not really sure if that is because of the change. As said I think I use 100uf for at least 4 years now.

If it still doesn't work I need the schematic and the sketch. It is hard to help you without those,

@bcdaus it's always difficult to discover what is wrong. But 9 out of 10 radio issues are always power related. I'm by no means an expert in electronics. But based upon what I learned in here, the capacitor values you use are too low. You say you tried 4.7uF and 0.1uF. But the value I use is a 100uf capacitor. And I think that is what is being promoted to use. I've used 10uf capacitors in the past, but I think that was before MS 2.0. 100uf hasn't given me any troubles.

I do notice sometimes, that sending multiple consecutive messages gives some troubles. So when I add a small delay in between it solves it. But I have to see your Sketch first to see if that might be a problem.

Also how do you power the radio, do you use a separate regulator, or do you take the 3.3V from the arduino?

In all honesty, I'm not quite convinced you'd need two separate networks. Just provide the security sensors, the repeaters, the gateway and your controller - that form the security system - with some sort of ups and they will keep running until the UPS has no more power left.
The none security devices will stop working when the power goes out and, unless I don't really understand your problem well. That does what I think you want to achieve? Unless you have combined a lot of sensors within a repeater it would really be my way to go. It wouldn't mean any modifications to your security hardware, because they need to be battery powered or have some sort of UPS anyway, to keep working when the power goes down.
But again it's hard to judge when you don't really understand the problem some one is trying to solve.

@JohanH - thanks for your reply! I also hope and think people who build commercial products have knowledge of this
But as a hobbyist, there are two ways to go - either you dont have to care or go bare minimum, if something happens its your own fault, or you can try to make is as safe as possible.

My idea was never to make this thread a information source for a commercial product. I wanted to try to make my own products as safe as possible since I have children around. With that in mind, i want to be on the safe side of things so some things i use from here might be exaggerated.

But my PCB (HLK-PM01 breakout) is working great, and I feel safe. I have had it outdoors (under roof covered in IP5* box, -20 to +30 aprox) and its been working for me for a couple of years now. Better than I had before, when i just stripped an old fake samsung charger.

/Andreas

@Snyfir if they can't work anyway, why do you want to filter them?

@Snyfir thanks for explaining. How come you want the B sensors to be disabled when the power is off? Why can’t they be allowed to continue working?

@APL2017 I think the gesture sensor is awesome. But just to switch things on and off. Because dimming with hand gestures is fun at the beginning, but I discovered I didn't use it much after a few months. To me most of my projects are just experiments on finding usable ways to interact with my house.
But there are some good use cases in where a gesture controller is the best switch you can imagine. Because it is contactless. Like in your garage when you are working on stuff like cars and get your hands dirty. You don't want to make you wall switches dirty.
Or in your kitching while cooking. But dimming with gesture is not very convenient. So I would set a max dimmer level of 5 or so.

@emre299 the booster likely adds noise to the power line, and it is a known fact that the nrf24 is very sensitive to this.
Either filter the noise, or better, get a decent booster.

@APL2017 Posting one question multiple times isn't gonna give you an answer quickly. I just wanted to say that.

I see the code on the website is still in pre MS 2.0. It should be easy to convert it to MS 2.0. The only problem is that I don't have the hardware setup to check if it works. If I can find some time this week I will convert it, so that it at least compiles. But I can not test it and can't promise I will finish it this week.

But @pjjarzembowski version should work, you should only strip out the extra sensors he attached to his node.

After playing with dimmers and Domoticz for quite some time, I've discovered that 15 brightness levels is all I need. Because it's hard to see the difference is brightness level if you have 100 levels. And also it takes a lot of gestures to move from max to min. So the code can be simplified more. By just mapping the Domotics level (1-100) to (1-15) and the opposite when you send the nodes brightness level to Domoticz.

Also Domoticz behaves odd when it comes to dimmer actuators as I discovered during a project I'm working on now. There are some work arounds for that, which envolve storing the brightness levels on the eeprom of your node. I know 100000 times is a lot. But I really don't see the need to store each brightness level change in the eeprom.

@cabat what are you trying to achieve? Setting that LNA_HCURR to 1? It appears indeed to be 1 by default in MySensors