Fewer home automation postings? What's behind it?

[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@gohan actually, a lot of the examples in the build section are out of date :-( It caused a lot of unnecessary frustration.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.

[scalz]

Not always easy to find time
I just can say there are a lot of ideas, work in progress etc by MySensors team. to improve user experience, but I can't tell you more :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

@alowhum
maybe, you could:

• publish articles, howtos on openhardware or the forum so it could be easily linked in mysensors.org, and get feedbacks from the community etc
• PR on github when possible, there is a dedicated repo for mysensors sketch too
• do your own website, or blog etc where you would share your xp. sure why not

there are pros and cons I imagine. in each case you'll help people ;)

[Sergio Rius]

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

I can't tell you more :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Yes, that's what I was referring to. But anyways, I should be ignored again.

Edit: definitely should.

[NeverDie]

Intended as constructive criticism: I think more expressive diagnostics would go a long way toward helping newcomers troubleshoot what's going wrong with their particular situation. The serial output is cryptic to the uninitiated, and although there is a log parser, it seems incomplete and probably not very illuminating to newcomers.

Toward that end: I was very intrigued by someone's recent posted project that was a kind of connection "doctor" that would help diagnose. Seemed like it had a lot of potential and might even buttress the above. Anyone tried it?

[tbowmo]

@sergio-rius

there can be certain things preventing one disclosing projects.. Most of it is probably the fear of getting swarmed by requests about progress of the project, since it is so awesome that people just can't wait for it :)

Do remember, that we are all here using our (limited) sparetime, and have a lot of other activities going on as side projects as well.. For my part, I have about 1 hour a day during the evening, that I can devote to "Me time", that is for mysensors and all the other projects that I work on. And also trying to learn new skills, that could be useful for my daytime job :). And I do have way too many projects rolling at the moment.. :) And I know that @scalz is not on the lazy side as well, when it comes to fun projects that take up his time.. :)

[Sergio Rius]

Of course, projects are always difficult to manage and often they must be completely flipped like an omelet.
But what seems recurrent is that only a small group of people knows whats the next step in development. So someone starts doing anything and by the time he wants to pr discovers that the sources had changed path and what he has done, now doesn't make sense. Or simply, opinions and ideas are ignored as they happen to be incompatible or undesirable for the (secret) idea of the project.
I think is something inherent with open source projects. But sometimes is discouraging.
I think it may be solutions for publishing wanted changes and preventing people annoying developers.
I would like a future where desired functionalities would be published in a list and anyone could sign for doing them.

Sorry if words look rough, I assure is not intended, I still have problems with the english.

[NeverDie]

It's hard to complain if the price is "free." ;)

[rejoe2]

@sergio-rius You know about the MySenors roadmap? It's open visible to everybody here: https://github.com/mysensors/MySensors/projects. Aint't that the sort of "list" you were thinking of?

Not being part of the dev community, but most likely there are no "hidden side projects", so in case you have additional ideas for the roadmap, feel free to open an issue on github ;-) .

But most likely we are far OT by now here.

[Sergio Rius]

@neverdie If you are referring to me, no. I'm not complaining. Just wanting to contribute but I'm to slow to take the train in time. Sorry if seemed anything else.

[Sergio Rius]

@rejoe2 No, I didn't see this. Been out more than a year by an accident and I'm still getting used to all the changes.
Thanks!

[rejoe2]

@sergio-rius Sorry for the somehow misleading referer: Meant was : "Me not beeing ..."

[alexsh1]

Just my 2 cents
What @NeverDie is saying is true - it may be seasonal or just a decline trend very hard to say.
I do see this across all HA forums.
Firstly, a normal temp/hum node is not exciting any more - it has to be more intellegent. Like Alexa, please tell me ...
Another thing is that generally with social media development, I did notice a lot of forums activity has declined or simply stopped.

Let’s not forget that there are many plug and plug HA solutions and DIY may not appeal to all people