[Solved] Arduino Nanos don't work as nodes

[Avamander]

@niclas

I meant, have you erased the EEPROM of the gateway?

Yes, that too.

And also, how is the interrupt pin connected?

The radio's IRQ pin is not connected. (The IRQ pin is only required to be connected if the MY_RX_MESSAGE_BUFFER_FEATURE is defined in the sketch.)

[niclas]

@Avamander Regarding the interrupt pin, at least when using the RFM95 I need to have the pin connected to be able to receive anything. It doesnt poll the module to check for incoming messages. Maybe its different with nRF24.

I haven't tried messing with the MY_RX_MESSAGE_BUFFER_FEATURE so I wouldnt know about that.

[Avamander]

@niclas

Well, the documentation says I don't have to have it connected.

@electrik

I suggest to start with one of the examples.

The gateway and node both are examples with the minimal required changes.

The RF channel is the same everywhere I guess?

Yes.

What does the output on the gateway say?

Nothing, totally silent. When I plug in the Mega node, then it starts outputting all the sensor and other data.

Anyways, the weird thing here is that I remember this working a few years or so ago on the same boards and stuff, it just doesn't work now and I have 0 clue why. I'm thinking about downgrading MySensors to 1.something

[niclas]

@Avamander Found the documentation you were referring to and yes. Seems to be true for the RF24 which I haven't used in a long time.

#define MY_RX_MESSAGE_BUFFER_FEATURE

This enables the receiving buffer feature.

This feature is currently not supported for anything but RF24. Require MY_RF24_IRQ_PIN to be set.

Note: Not supported on ESP8266, ESP32, STM32, nRF5 and sketches that use SoftSPI. See below issue for details https://github.com/mysensors/MySensors/issues/1128

Definition at line 2406 of file MyConfig.h.

[electrik]

I don't think this is a software issue. More likely your NRF24 is failing.

[Avamander]

@electrik It's highly unlikely. I have more than one type of module and more than one module of each type, none of them work. I also swapped the modules between working GW and Mega node and it still works, I swap the module between working GW and the node, it doesn't work.

[electrik]

Could you try version 2.2 of mysensors? I remember summer changes in 2.4 regarding nrf modules

[Avamander]

@electrik :

Could you try version 2.2 of mysensors? I remember summer changes in 2.4 regarding nrf modules

I went to the oldest available version and it doesn't work.

I don't really get it, if I swap the radios between the Mega node and the Nano node, it stops working, swapping CE/CSN also makes it stop working - any alterations make it fail loud and clear.

It does initialize the radio and claim everything is okay. I can be quite certain it's not the radios, it's not the boards themselves, it's not the wiring.

There's something very specific to the Nanos themselves that 2.x.x is unable to use the nRF24L01+.

I will assemble an Arduino Uno board and see if the issue is specific to the AtMega328P.

[Avamander]

I also ran the full "test" suite of RF24 and all examples work great, so I am very certain communication is likely to be very good.

It's just that something makes MySensors not like it.

[Avamander]

Just in case I also took clean RepeaterNode example and just defined the CE/CSN pins and channel, it's still unable to work.

I also tried the same example without any repeater functionality enabled, it's still unable to register. It's basically a blank sketch.

Changing Node ID didn't also work.

[electrik]

In your first sketch the baud rate was 2mbps. How is your existing network configured?
If you take an example sketch and an example gateway sketch, does it work then. So don't change channels and so on

[Avamander]

In your first sketch the baud rate was 2mbps. How is your existing network configured?

That's exactly the same across all my sketches.

If you take an example sketch and an example gateway sketch, does it work then. So don't change channels and so on

Yeah, I did that and wrote about it above, took RepeaterNode and just defined CE/CSN on GW and the node.

[Avamander]

I've determined that it doesn't matter which:

• Radio
• Radio's power supply/source
• Nano
• Bootloader
• Arduino IDE (tried 1.8.2 and latest nightly)
• 2.x.x MySensors
• Example, or custom sketch
• Channel, data rate, power level or node ID
• Repeater or not
• WAIT_READY_MS or not
• Predefined master or not
• SPI bus speed, 0.5*default SPI speed didn't help

I just can't make a Nano act as a regular node.

Maybe a MySensors dev has an idea what I could try.

[Avamander]

I'm going to finish my Arduino Uno node and if that too doesn't work getting MyController to work must take some goat sacrifice because I can't do it.

[Avamander]

I just discovered that on the Arduino Uno RF24_250KBPS works, but RF24_2MBPS doesn't. On the Nanos, neither work.

I used RF24 and tested the boards for a while, I've determined that 2MBPS on that specific channel works great, I've sent at least 100 000 packets and lost only two. Auto-ack and dynamic payloads also work.

I am 99.99% certain this is a bug in MySensors. @mfalkvidd maybe you have some ideas where to look next?

[Yveaux]

@Avamander nano's are basically just regular atmega328 boards, running off 5v at 16MHz. The MySensors stack doesn't know if it is running on a nano, uno or pro mini, so why are you so certain this is a bug in the stack?
What I do know is that a lot of low quality nanos are available from Chinese sources, with bad ground planes or crappy power regulators.
What nano boards do you use? Could you try a different atmega328 based arduino?

[Avamander]

@Yveaux said in Arduino Nanos don't work as nodes:

The MySensors stack doesn't know if it is running on a nano, uno or pro mini, so why are you so certain this is a bug in the stack?
What I do know is that a lot of low quality nanos are available from Chinese sources, with bad ground planes or crappy power regulators.

Because I'm really rather certain it isn't the hardware. You can read what I've replaced, swapped and tried. The radios have been decoupled, the power has been decoupled. The setup works in all possible ways when using RF24.

What nano boards do you use? Could you try a different atmega328 based arduino?

Yeah, I said I tried an Uno and it exhibited pretty much the same symptoms when acting as a regular node.

[tekka]

@Avamander Can you upload both, the GW and node sketches from the working pair nanoGW/megaNode? Also, it would be helpful to see the full GW log from the non-working combination (nanoNode/megaGW) with MY_DEBUG_VERBOSE_RF24 enabled. If time allows, I'd like to reproduce and test your setup.

[Avamander]

@tekka

Just to be clear, the Arduino Mega node (megaNode) can talk to the Arduino Nano gateway (nanoGW), but no Arduino Nano node (nanoNode) can talk to the Arduino Nano gateway.

I'll post the sketches and logs.

[Avamander]

Ah, I think cussing is warranted here, I copied the radio configuration from my old sketch to the new ones, the node had:

#define RF24_DATARATE RF24_2MBPS

The GW has:

#define MY_RF24_DATARATE RF24_2MBPS

Lesson learned: Never copy configuration from an existing older sketch, you never know what has been deprecated without a warning. MY_RADIO_NRF24 threw a warning and I fixed that, had no idea about RF24_DATARATE and I didn't notice it. :sweat_smile: