💬 MySensors NRF5 Platform

[NeverDie]

@omemanti You want the mysensors development fork.

[NeverDie]

Also, this: https://github.com/d00616/ArduinoHwNRF5

[Omemanti]

@neverdie

• removed 2.2.0 => installed 2.2.1 Alpha.
• boards check.

Still:

error: 'struct NRF_UARTE_Type' has no member named 'TASKS_SUSPEND'

   NRF_UARTE0->TASKS_SUSPEND = 1;

               ^

exit status 1
'struct NRF_UARTE_Type' has no member named 'TASKS_SUSPEND'```

[alowhum]

Let's say I've just bought a $2,50 NRF52 board.

Does anyone know a good tutorial for absolute beginners?

For example:

• I have no idea what a softdevice is. Should I know?
• I don't know what hardware I need. A normal serial adapter or an ST-link? Should I hack an STM32 into a black magic probe (whatever that is..), or is that for power users?
• To what pins do I connect to upload a sketch?
• How are you connecting wires onto the package? Just hotglue and very steady hands? Some cheap adapter or board? Any tips and tricks?
• There's something about text files that define how the pins work? But the serial pins are always the same? Where does the text-file go? What flavours are there? Which is the most popular?
• What boards should I enable in the Arduino IDE?
• How do I debug my sketch? Does the serial monitor work?
• Do I still need the development version of MySensors now that we are at V2.2?
• Do I need to set anything in MySensors?
• Are encryption, signing and the simple options to do this supported?
• What can it do? Can I connect a 5v sensor to it? Can it power things in the way that an Arduino can?

[Anticimex]

@alowhum all security functionality currently available for MySensors is supported om nrf52. There is nothing in the security road map that will not be supported on nrf52. The MAY be features that work best with a security peripheral but there will always be software compatible alternatives for released features that can operate on nrf52 unless it is natively supported by the HW peripherals in the chip.

[Nca78]

@alowhum you can start with this:
https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/6705/mysensors-nrf5-platform/1
and
https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/7869/start-with-nrf5-is-very-simple/1

But you should also check the NRF5 information on Nordic website.
In short it's 3.3V max (so no 5V peripherals directly), you need to program through the 2 SWD pins (SWDCLK and SWDIO) and you have different options for that, for debugging use a FTDI adapter and connect it to the pins you have assigned as TX/RX.

[Nca78]

Hello,

has someone successfully used VisualMicro with the MySensors NRF5 boards ?
In the board selector dropdown list I can select any board, including NRF5 boards like "Generic NRF51" or "BBC Microbit", except when I select MySensors NRF51 or NRF52 boards, then it's not doing anything and keeping the previous selected board. I have a message in the status bar saying "the first available board has been selected" and that's all, I don't find anything related to VisualMicro with this error message in Google.
I have tried with both 0.1 and 0.3 versions of the boards, and with both "Arduino 1.6/1.9" and "Visual Micro (No IDE)" IDE selections.

[nagelc]

I like VisualMicro and think I got this to work but was mostly using plain Arduino to keep things simple while figuring it out. I haven't worked on an NRF5 board for a few weeks. I will check my setup. Might be a day or two before I can get back to it.

[nagelc]

@nca78
No. I was mistaken. I have the same issue as you. I used the arduino program with the MySensors NRF5. I would like to get this to work also. Please post if you find a solution.

[Nca78]

@nagelc thank you for taking the time to check, I'll go with Arduino for NRF5 at the moment and keep that for a moment when I'll be more keen on fixing technical problems :)

[Shodney]

What are people using for a gateway with these?

I'm currently using this from @NeverDie , which seems to work for the most part, but I'm getting a lot of connection errors:

2018-04-18 18:27:35 ERROR (Thread-2) [mysensors.gateway_tcp] Receive from server failed.

2018-04-18 18:27:35 INFO (Thread-2) [mysensors.gateway_tcp] Closing socket at ('10.0.50.100', 2323).
2018-04-18 18:27:35 INFO (Thread-2) [mysensors.gateway_tcp] Socket closed at ('10.0.50.100', 2323).
2018-04-18 18:27:35 INFO (Thread-2) [mysensors.gateway_tcp] Trying to connect to ('10.0.50.100', 2323)
2018-04-18 18:27:35 INFO (Thread-2) [mysensors.gateway_tcp] Connected to ('10.0.50.100', 2323)
2018-04-18 18:27:52 INFO (Thread-2) [mysensors.gateway_tcp] Closing socket at ('10.0.50.100', 2323).

They seem to come up about 75% of the time when the gateway receives a message from a node.

I thought it might be a power thing, so I messed around with a few caps and a separate power source for the hat but nothing seems to have made a difference.

Everything seems to work despite this, but I don't really want my log to be filled with these errors if I can help it.

Has anyone attempted to build a wired gateway or anything similar?

[Omemanti]

@shodney i used this one for a couple of tests. I resoldered the caps near the top and connected a new antenna. Works pretty well for testing purposes. I expect some pcb's a week ago😏 for some further testing.

[NeverDie]

The gateway I've used has been:
https://www.openhardware.io/view/491/PA-LNA-nRF52832-ESP-LINK-Shield-for-Wemos-D1-Mini-ESP8266
I haven't noticed any problems.

[nagelc]

@nca78 I posted to the VisualMicro forum. They responded right away. They are going to fix it in the next release. Something to do with internal naming conventions.

[alowhum]

I've created a BME280 node along the lines of the NRF5 beginners guide I posted.

But something odd is happening. The node works great for about 8 hours.. and then it stops working.

I already changed the power supply, but the same thing happens.

Could it be a memory leak?

[NeverDie]

@alowhum I'm not sure the function call that reveals that amount of free memory available, but I'm sure there must be one. Logging that as a diagnostic would reveal whether you have a memory leak in your code.

[nagelc]

@nca78 I downloaded the latest update to VisualMicro last night and had mixed success. I can now pick the MyboardNRF5 boards, but run into a compile error where it cannot find the build directory. Have you tried it yet?

[Nca78]

@nagelc not yet I will give it a try tomorrow.

[NeverDie]

@d00616 Will everything work the same on the nRF52840?

Has anyone tried it?

[d00616]

@neverdie said in 💬 MySensors NRF5 Platform:

@d00616 Will everything work the same on the nRF52840?
Has anyone tried it?

Yes. At the moment, I have no time to finish my work on supporting the nrf52840. In my Repository https://github.com/d00616/ArduinoHwNRF5 you can find my last state. All 840 ports P0 (0-31) and P1 (62-64) should be usable as GPIO but there is no support using the P1 ports with any pin mapping component like UART, I2C....

The second change in my last commit is mcuboot. A bootloader compiled with Zephyr. Firmware can be upgraded OTA using MYSController with some enhancements (ask @tekka about the correct version). Firmware transmision works well but, at the moment my mcuboot port don't work. The memory layout between zephyr and arduino is different. The application cashes after start. I think it's a problem with different memory layout between Arduino and Zephyr.

For NRF52 MCUs the memory problem can be solved by moving the interrupt vector register to the IV location in the image and setting the SP register to the correct value. Maybe the starting code of ArduinoHwNRF5 is the correct position, so this mcuboot version can be used for Arduino and Zephyr Software.

If moving the SP to the correct position doesn't help, for NRF51 the Arduino linker scripts must be changed. I think there is only a small change required, but I have no idea about how to do this.

It's welcome if someone can finish this work.