Multiple NRF24 gateways

[Honza Liška]

Hi all. First, let me thank you guys for the awesome work on MySensors - it fits my purpose perfectly and it spared me a lot of time and hassle with some homemade system.

Now, to my problem: I have my controller (home assistant) running on Raspi with attached NRF24.

Because we have some thick walls here where I live, from time to time some nodes does not see GW properly. So I thought of adding another gateway (ESP8266 + NRF24) as a second "support" GW.

However, when I put together my test setup, I found out that my testing node (arduino Nano with some switch and NRF24) seems to register with both gateways - I can see the button widget twice in my Home Assistant GUI and the node status is persisted in two separate status files (each GW has its own status file at the controller's filesystem).

I tried to set a preferred/static parent node with MY_PARENT_NODE_ID and MY_PARENT_NODE_IS_STATIC, but this does not help, as all gateways have a NODE_ID = 0. So no luck there.

Now I wonder whether this setup is supported at all... or whether I miss some basic concept.

I do have some ideas how to move on (set up a repeater node instead of another gateway; operate second GW on a different frequency...), but I would like to better understand the principles before I start looking for a solution.

Thanks in advance for your insight!

[dbemowsk]

@Honza-Liška Why not set some of your nodes up as repeaters? Check out this link:
https://www.mysensors.org/download/sensor_api_20#create-repeating-nodes

[mfalkvidd]

@Honza-Liška welcome to the forum

There can only be one gateway prr MySensors network. Otherwise, you'll get all sorts of strange behavior (of which you have seen some already).

Repeater(s), other radios (rfm69 usually has better range), or separate networks are the most common solutions.

[Honza Liška]

Thanks for the info and confirmation! I will then move my testing setup to different frequency and the problems with coverage will resolve with repeaters.

(I do also have some RFM69 units laying around, but I do not want to use them for the time being due to their bigger footprint)