Intergrated Visual feedback for sensors
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Firstly, let me say I am excited about what I see here. I've had arduino pro mini's/micro's and nrf24l01's in my parts box eyeing me up for my foray into home automation for some time. This is basically an instant community for the same kind of idea I have been toying with for some time. Awesome.
I don't know how others feel, but having some sort of integrated visual feedback would be nice too. Adding an led (or with enough free i/o an rgb led) to every sensor and the ability to broadcast a message across the sensornet so that you can do things like 'flash all led's blue when new email arrives' or similar would be cool.
Anyway, am looking to the rpi controller like I am sure many others are. Thanks for the effort so far, and I hope to contribute in the future myself.
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Adding something to a sensor is easy, right?
If you want a LED, just add the code to do so in the slave.
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The fun part is to get it to indicate (like a single RGB LED) with different colours for different meanings, e.g.
Red: Alarm Armed
Green: All is Well
Blue: Colder than 5C outside
Yellow:Exterior motion Sensor TrippedThings like that...
Definitely do-able...
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This post is deleted!
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Since you can have every (let's just talk about mains powered for now) sensor/device check-in with the gateway as frequently as practicable, we could try something on the server side to ready a message that each device will call to.
Something like the following:
1: Reserve V_VAR5 on all of your powered sensors for a broadcast message updates.
2: Use Vera to populate every Variable5 (Server-side of V_VAR5) in the Arduino network by copying any change that occurs on a single Variable Container.
3: Set sensors to poll V_VAR5 with certain frequency (every 5mins?).
4: Create a standard C Function that gets appended to every sensor sketch and is called in the loop.
5: That function then decodes the message and instructs the sensor to energize the LED.
5: Use pins 3,5 & 6 PWM pins to create special message colours as outlined above on your RGB LED.If you want to work on this together, it sounds like a good one.
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Yeah, that's exactly the kind of schema with the kind of functionality I envisaged.
Some would have said to just get the controller to handle it and push out a bunch of messages to every sensor, but that seems like a lot of effort. As I am looking at mysensors as a means to implement my own complete home automation solution, the state of certain items (I like the examples given in your first post) no matter where your sensor happens to be is important to me. Security alerts seem like a good example, but the power to alert to anything information a sensor can provide is quite powerful, and I think would be a v.cool feature.
I can help in any way I can, but I'm not a coder (though am prepared to jump in and learn as much as is needed to get to the end result).
