Fewer home automation postings? What's behind it?

[gohan]

I am also keeping an eye on the xiaomi sensors as in fact they are cheap and better looking than anything you could make on your own. I am still wondering about their reliability and also I don't like a lot the gateway that connects directly to a wall plug.

[gadgetman]

@gohan I don't use their gateway as it's a bit clunky although it does have local control. Like many I use a Samsung smartthings hub which doesn't cost much more as it's often heavily discounted - pairing with the ST hub can be hit or miss though.

[NeverDie]

@gadgetman said in Fewer home automation postings? What's behind it?:

Rise of cheap zigbee sensors from China is my take. I have a bunch of highly reliable magnetic reed sensors, push buttons, PIR, temp sensors that are smaller and better looking than anything I could make with mysensors.

First I've heard of it. Any links?

[gadgetman]

@NeverDie Just do a search on sites like gearbest.com or Banggood.com for Xiaomi smart home. The common sensors go on sale fairly often but they're usually less than $10 a pop.

[gohan]

@gadgetman are you saying there is no guarantee to have the xiaomi sensors working on the ST hub?

[gadgetman]

@gohan Not at all. It's just that the pairing process has a manual element (as opposed to being capable of being auto discovered) to it as it's not officially supported by ST. Community members have developed device drivers for the window, temp, PIR and pushbutton switches. Although I had a few issues trying to settle on the right zigbee frequency (2.4Ghz so susceptible to interference from wifi sources), once that was sorted everything is working great.

[NeverDie]

@gadgetman said in Fewer home automation postings? What's behind it?:

smaller and better looking than anything I could make with mysensors.

@Nca78 Found some inexpensive yet attractive project boxes that you can put your sensors inside. Looks quite nice!
https://www.openhardware.io/view/411/BlackCircle-Sensor-High-WAF-TempHum-sensor

[scalz]

I agree with @gadgetman , it's easier&quicker to get started for "HA noobs" or those who don't want to spend too much time in hardware.

I thought about trying xia**i devices too. But I have no use, I have enough boards for my needs :grin:

That said, i've not been tempted because, and that's important for me:

1. I want to fully control my HA, and it's also easier if use 1 or 2 protocols instead of many
2. so I can debug inside
3. and I don't need to wait for an API update
4. and I can also fix a faulty hw as I've fun making my hw. But this is not the most valuable argument here, I agree, regarding such a cheap and simple sensor.

1 to 3 : solved by using a great and secure opensource lib... MySensors :)

But if i can make my devices looking great with 3d printer and a few tricks to improve look, more features or sensors, smaller, and the final cost not more than twice the price of a xia**i, . I'm happy to forget counting my time lol. But we're getting in connoisseur field I agree

[robosensor]

Ikea is also producing zigbee-compatible smart home components (TRÅDFRI series), including led lighting, dimmers, PIRs, ethernet gateways without cloud-based parts (can work w/o internet).

Starting from $11-$19 for dimmers/PIRs here in Poland.

[alowhum]

"From my personal experience, it will be failure and frustration that gets people down. They arrive at this site and it all looks really good.....until you come to try it and then you discover a whole nets of vipers just waiting."

I've been thinking that it would be nice to create a spinoff website for MySensors that focuses on ease of use and tried-an-tested solutions. Plug n play.

For example, a beautiful site with a few home automation staples, and with the best sensors to use for that scenario, and upload-and-go code. Ideally people wouldn't need to solder anything.

Then that site could be used for workshops on DIY, cheap and privacy friendly home automation, for example in libraries.

[gohan]

Not even all commercial product are tested, plug n play and easy to use. In the build section there are some ready solutions with code and suggested sensors to use.

[alowhum]

@gohan actually, a lot of the examples in the build section are out of date :-( It caused a lot of unnecessary frustration. See this post I made earlier.

[scalz]

@alowhum said in Fewer home automation postings? What's behind it?:

"From my personal experience, it will be failure and frustration that gets people down. They arrive at this site and it all looks really good.....until you come to try it and then you discover a whole nets of vipers just waiting."

I've been thinking that it would be nice to create a spinoff website for MySensors that focuses on ease of use and tried-an-tested solutions. Plug n play.

For example, a beautiful site with a few home automation staples, and with the best sensors to use for that scenario, and upload-and-go code. Ideally people wouldn't need to solder anything.

Then that site could be used for workshops on DIY, cheap and privacy friendly home automation, for example in libraries.

that would just be reinventing the wheel, a no end wheel, imho.. Doesn't MySensors website already focus on these goals?

I think that would be better to improve what exists. If there are issues with some sketch, why not fix them?

About the 'whole net of vipers' someone mentioned..

Even if, in the best of world, people wouldn't need to solder anything nor programming, their device for 1buck (soon 'My HA for one buck' or better, 'My House for one buck' lol) I think they will always get some troubles if they don't read, learn etc..
Minimal skills and effort are needed. There are too much different hardware, setup etc to feed support for every case.
What I mean is you could try to build an alternative website for a some usecase, but you won't cover all newbie questions, else you would need to build another mysensors.org :)

But why not, feel free to create a more friendly, bug-free, up-to-date website. In this case you're brave because there is the core team, admins, for this job, which knows well the lib (better for reliable docs and advices), or help us to improve what exists ;)

[gohan]

Developing new code, test it, update the web site and so on are time consuming activities and since MySensors is not a commercial product, there are not people spending the whole days doing all of them so something gets left behind inhevitably

[alowhum]

@gohan I actually did all that, but got a lot of pushback.

I created:

• An upgrade to the Dallas temperature sensor to make it non-blocking.
  https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/6395/new-non-blocking-temperature-sensor-code
• A new temperature node that uses the BME280, which I think should be the default recommended temperature/humidity/airpressure sensor.
  https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/6406/next-generation-temperature-sensor-for-mysensors/9
• A new dust sensor that uses a laser based sensor. This one actually works, is more precise, and allows uses to compare values because the fan is built-in (so everyone has the same fan = same airspeed).
  https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/6404/next-generation-dust-sensor-for-mysensors
• A new Co2 sensor
  https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/6528/mh-z19-co2-sensor/

[gohan]

Who pushed back?

[alowhum]

Let's not go into that.

[Sergio Rius]

In my opinion, and a way to leave this topic, I find the project is a bit uncoordinated. (There are some brilliant people there. That's out question)

I mean, we have the mysensors library, that needs slight configuration when used in nodes. But definitely one must set some things, as channel. (Other things are part of the hardware)
Then is signing and encryption. And it's understanding and use is not trivial.
Then nodemanager and mysbootloader.
Every "module" by its own.

The bootloader has the ability to rewrite the program in the node. It could be feasible to parametrize security and operation settings (in EEPROM?) and the bootloader set them initially only requiring radio settings being hard coded.
And those ones could be added as parameters to bootloader compilation.

That should make something more useable. But someone must have already thought about it. I'm not that clever.

I've already started some interesting things myself, but always abandon them by fear of project changing paths , little time to invest at the right moment, or simply not being a popular contributor.

I'm a .net programmer and been waiting the opportunity to do something for emby in this platform. If someone know about the recent "changes" in that project, will understand my sadness. So when I saw a not so friendly project I start to fear.

[rejoe2]

@alowhum
Some more personal remarks (hard to do in english, to be honest):

Reading your postings wrt. to the DS18B20 things and your enhancement proposals, I can somehow understand about your frustration. (The DS18B20 and BME280 I also use, so this is a part I can follow to some extend, other than a lot of other hardware you mentioned). I also suffered from changes in the libs that made it not to easy to get things going (routines from "the outer world" becoming private and so on). And some of the comments on your code in the mentioned thread are rather hard to understand or interpret.
As I also did one pull request in the past, I also know how high one's frustration tolerance has to be just to get through the necessary organisational process (including copyright questions and so on).

But: this is necessary stuff to go through... And the devs here are really doing a great job in quality assurance - at least imo.. But to be honest: It also took me quite a lot of time to find out, how difficult it in fact is to choose the right compromise between a lot of aspects.

Just one example: Your last proposal wrt. to temperature was to use BME280 as a future standard. Did you ever use more than 2 temp sensors on one node? Most likely not, as this is more or less only possible using the 1wire protocoll (I have around 25 of them on 3 nodes using 7 Pins as data lines).
And BME280: Try to compile the last version of the lib for ATMega328: It's broken... And the lib consumes way more memory (ok, to be honest: most likely most is for doing forecast calculations).
So please keep two things in mind:

• The two of us just see a small part of the world and are just about to start understanding how things really fit together. So going just one step after the next is best way to do. Don't be to eager, good ideas will find their way in the MySensors or Arduino code base.
• There are a lot of forums around, but only a few have the spirit you find here: If you ask your questions, you will most likely get a friendly answer that could bring your project forward!

So a big thank you to all the devs and mods around here! Great job!

[gohan]

Examples based on external libraries are also difficult to maintain as libraries change over time and after some months sketches could fail to compile. Personally I'd prefer SHT31 over BME280 because of accuracy and the internal heater to dry up the humidity sensors to get more precise readings.
Unfortunately working with nodes at this level it is not for beginners IMHO, you need some skills especially when it comes to debug problems: if you are not able to fix come compilation errors and understand how to debug a complex nodes network, you will eventually get stuck sooner or later.