Confused...sensors hook up to what?

[A Former User]

I'm a noop at electronics, but understand programming fine. I've read the 4-5 pages of intro on the mysensors.org site. I'm confused as to what the sensors are connected to. I was thinking of hooking the nRF24L01+ to my Raspberry Pi (using it as my gateway also) and then communicate with sensors around the house. For the world of me I can't figure out what each sensor is hooked up to? Do they each need their own Adrino board? If so, that seems hefty if you want more than just a few sensors to communicate with.

Hoping I just missed the explanation on this.

Thanks.

[Jan Gatzke]

Yes, you need an Arduino for every node. An Arduino pro mini is less than 3$.

[sj44k]

@PaulTechGuy

You are able to combine several sensors on one Arduino but most examples you find on the MySensors site are based on 1 sensor per Arduino.
If you are able to write your own arduino sketches you should be able to manage to have more than one sensor per arduino depending on the type and need for input and outputs of the Arduino, but even the smallest Arduino has many input and output ports enabling you to have multiple / different sensors per Arduino.

Having this said, and taking your ability of programming you should be able to figure this out.

Having an Raspbery Pi as an gateway has it's limmitations at this current moment so make sure you are aware of this.
I have got my Raspberry currently operational (check my postings for my struggle )

My advise is buy a few Arduino's mini and at least 1 Arduino Nano or Mega and start playing with it, the learning curve is quite steep but it's so much fun

[A Former User]

Thanks for the helpful information. I didn't realize the Arduino mini can be found for under $5. I'll start taking a look at this. Good information from all.

[sj44k]

Check the shop part of the mysensors.org website you will be amazed
Just be sure that you buy any Arduino with at least the ATmega328.

I made a mistake buying the Arduino Mini with an ATmega168 micro controller (which is also available) but this has only half the amount of Flash Memory and EEPROM.

This makes it unusable for the sketches you will find on MySensors.org, and the price difference between the 2 types of Arduinos is a matter of cents.