Confirming node connected to gateway.

[skywatch]

I was thinking of adding something to nodes so that when I reboot them I can see at the node if it has connected to the GW or not. Maybe a message on a small oled to confirm successful registration.

What would be the most reliable way to do this?
Can I get some value back from presentation stage?
Is there anything better to do (like get confirmation from the controller)?

Maybe I missed the obvious here, but it's late and I have a cold.

[FotoFieber]

@skywatch
I look for messages (e.g. presentation) at the gateway to diagnose connections at bootup. And I have a flow in node-red, which shows me, when a node didn't send for some time.

You could use a led and blink codes on the node, if you really need a local indicator. A OLED would be a no go with battery powered sensors.

[skywatch]

Thanks for the reply.

I really just need 'something' at the node so that when I power it on I know that it has successfully established communication with the gateway.

On mains powered units it could be a message on a display, on battery units it could be number of flashes of an led.

I do not know 'how' I can do this. Is there some response at the node that I can monitor/interrogate to find out if successful connection has been made with a remote gateway?

[alowhum]

Here's an example from some of my code, specifically the SETUP function.

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(115200); // for serial debugging over USB.

  if(isTransportReady()){
    Serial.println(F("Connected to gateway!"));
  }else{
    Serial.println(F("! NOT CONNECTED TO GATEWAY"));  
  }

#ifdef HAS_DISPLAY
  mySerial.begin(115200);
  wait(1500);
  mySerial.print(F("CLR(0);"));
  mySerial.print(F("SBC(0);"));
  
  if(isTransportReady()){
    mySerial.print(F("DCV16(115,1,w,0);"));
  }

  // Labels
  mySerial.print(F("DCV16(10,155,Barometer,5);"));  // Barometer label

  // Wait icon
  mySerial.print(F("CIRF(120,239,35,3);"));       // Circle as a background
  //mySerial.print(F("SBC(3);"));
  //mySerial.print(F("DCV16(105,230,wait,15);"));     // Show while the forecast is not available yet.
  //mySerial.println(F("SBC(0);"));

  wait(400);
#endif

  if(!bme280.init()){
    Serial.println(F("! Sensor error"));
#ifdef HAS_DISPLAY
    mySerial.println(F("DCV16(10,250,Sensor error,1);"));
#endif
  }

  wdt_enable(WDTO_2S);                              // Starts the watchdog timer. If it is not reset once every 2 seconds, then the entire device will automatically restart.                                
}

Personally I then display a "w" icon in the top-right of the screen if a connection has been made.

In the loop code it requests an ACK whenever it updates the sensor values to the gateway (once a minute). There is also a simple incrementing counter byte that increases by 1 every time there is no reply. As soon as this reaches 5 (meaning no response from the server for 5 minutes in a row) it prints an " " to the corner of the screen, to indicate the loss of connection.

If data once again arrives in the receive function, then a "w" is once again printed to the top right corner, and the incrementing byte is set back to 0.

[skywatch]

@alowhum Thank you for sharing this! - This looks like exactly the kind of thing I was trying to achieve.

Hopefully I get some time at the weekend to test it out.

Cheers! :)