Sensebender Micro

[Stephan Noller]

Hi guys,
amazing board! But i have a question: The Arduino IDE offerst two options as destination - 8MHz and 1MHz. Which one should i chose? My board seems to work in general, but not very realiable...

[Sparkman]

@Stephan-Noller Out of the box, I had to use the 8MHz option to upload the sketch to it.

Cheers
Al

[tbowmo]

The sensebender is set up to run at 8Mhz. There is an option to build it for 1Mhz, but you have to switch the prescaler yourself in your sketch.

However I think the current consumption saved by running on 1Mhz vs 8Mhz is very limited on the sensebender, as the oscillator is shut down the majority of time (when we are sleeping the MCU).
. I have not made any measurements on this yet (busy with a 1000 of other projects)

[Sparkman]

@ServiceXp Your hunch was correct. I built another Sensebender that only transmitted battery levels, and it's battery levels did not vary at all:

I then modified the sketch to put a short wait after the temp & humidity are sent to allow the voltage level to recover and the battery levels do not fluctuate so far. However, I'm thinking it would be better to always measure right after a transmit, but not sure if that's easy to do.

Cheers
Al

[RJ_Make]

@Sparkman Thanks for the follow up.

[epierre]

@hek can anyone help me, no unit is functionnal so far...

@epierre said:

@hek

I started it plugged to a vinduino like schema, so I had this :

Sensebender Micro FW 1.2 - TestMode
Testing peripherals!
-> SI7021 : ok!
-> Flash : failed!
-> SHA204 : Ok (serial : 01232F36E159E8ADEE)
Test finished
----> Selftest failed!

I read your posts, replaces 1.4.1 libs by 1.5, reflashed it with the demo code and here is what I have:

Sensebender Micro FW 1.2radio init fail

is that because I don't have a 1.5 serial gateway ?

I have the socket and the FTDI on the same side so I may avoid the above ?

[hek]

@epierre said:

is that because I don't have a 1.5 serial gateway ?

Gateway version shouldn't matter if you get this message at startup of node.

I have the socket and the FTDI on the same side so I may avoid the above ?

I don't understand what you mean.

[epierre]

@hek said:

@epierre said:

is that because I don't have a 1.5 serial gateway ?

Gateway version shouldn't matter if you get this message at startup of node.

what should I do from there ?

I have the socket and the FTDI on the same side so I may avoid the above ?

I don't understand what you mean.

this was related to the electric perturbation with headers close to the radio

[Sparkman]

@epierre Can you confirm the settings you used in the IDE to program it? Are you sure there are no solder bridges where you soldered the radio or socket for the radio? Have you tried powering it with a couple of AA batteries after you uploaded the sketch?

Cheers
Al

[Heinz]

Today I integrated my first 2 sensebender micros into my homeautomation and they almost worked out of the box. I like this board really much! Good work, I will order more!

Pitfall:
When updating the mysensors lib from 1.4.x to 1.5 the sensor failed to get an id from the controller which btw was still running on 1.4.x.
After having done all the things like "clearing eeprom", "soldering a capacitor to the radio" and so on... I noticed that I changed the RF_CHANNEL from the default 76 to some other value in MyConfig.h some months ago (probably for some paranoia reason).
When updating to lib 1.5 the sensor sketch got the 76 while the gateway still used the other one and so the communication between both failed. After changing the radio channel to the one the controller uses, everything worked very quickly!

Probably this post helps someother guy who fell into the same trap.

[johnr]

Hi,

My sense bender works perfect when sending directly data directly to serial gateway (vera 5), however when I move it out of range to the serial gateway and want it to connect to my repeater node it does not want to discover the repeater node. Anyone else had this problem?

[hek]

Remember that it takes a few ( ~5) failed transmits until it searches for a new parent node.

[Dwalt]

@johnr

Is your repeater node still on MySensors 1.4? I had a similar problem and upgrading to 1.5 solved it.

[johnr]

You are probably right. I did not realise sense bender was pre loaded with 1.5

I think easiest for me would be to downgrade sense bender to 1.4 is it possible?

[tbowmo]

Sensebender is still on 1.4, as we haven't prepared new firmware for it yet.

Mysensors 1.4 and 1.5 should be compatible with each other, right @hek ?

[hek]

Yes, it should.

But as @Dewalt says, there was a bug in repeater functionality. So upgrading the repeater is a good tip.

[johnr]

Upgrading repeater to 1.5 solved this issue. Thanks for the quick help. 1.4 sensors communicate OK with the 1.5 repeater as far as I can see right now.

[Fabien]

I try to make a 3D box for SenseBender Micro with CR123 battery.
Screenchot :

[Fabien]

first print test :

[tbowmo]

@Fabien

Nice work, what is the dimensions of the enclosure?