Raspberry Pi/Motieno - Serial or Ethernet Gateway?

[philbolduc]

Hi, I am setting up a gateway for MySensors. I am using:

• a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
• a Low Power Lab Mighty Hat with a RFM69 transceiver (https://lowpowerlab.com/shop/product/130)

The Mighty Hat connects to the Pi via the TX/RX pins (serial device) for communication. The Pi will be wired via the ethernet cable to network.

The question is would I be creating a serial or ethernet gateway? Or do I create two gateways,

• one that runs on the Pi that does Ethernet <-> serial where it translates to/from the mysensor messages
• one that does serial <-> rfm69 which primarily listens for messages from the sensor nodes?

or does the mighty hat work like a node too doing the serial <-> rfm69?

I will have a number of different rfm69 sensor nodes (temperature, water meter, etc).

Thanks in advance,

Phil Bolduc
Victoria, Canada

[zboblamont]

@philbolduc I suggest looking again at the MySensors intros, the terminology will click..
Your Pi3 will host the management platform of your choice (Domoticz, etc..), and is usually referred to as the "Controller". The Controller communicates with the Hat which is your Gateway, over the serial connection. It is the Gateway outward where the MySensors environment kicks in.
In your case the Hat should be programmed as a MySensors Serial Gateway (Moteino site has a clear how to).
The Gateway thereafter communicates with your MySensors Nodes via the rfm69s, and back to the Controller over serial.

Whether you elect to go wifi or ethernet from the Controller outward is entirely up to you, but is external to the MySensors environment.

[philbolduc]

Thank you! That actually does clear it up. I already have a Home Assistant instance which is different than the Pi that is going to use the Hat. Since it is separate, I am making it more difficult on myself. However, like you said, the Hat will be a serial gateway and I will have code on the Pi that reads and parses the serial API data. Then it is up to me get that to Home Assistant. Since my initial use case is to monitor a number of BME280s, I can publish the data to MQTT. Then HA or Node Red can use it. I appreciate your response.