OpenHAB setup

[Tango2]

As a disclaimer, I'm not a programmer by any means, but I'm learning. I have OpenHAB setup and working and haven't touched the setup in about a year. I'm using MySensors with two sensor nodes currently. They are both powered (not battery) and only capturing temp and humidity values and sending to my serial gateway via NF radios.

Hardware is currently RPi and Arduino UNO GW, and Nano sensors. I would like to expand my setup and include some additional sensors. I'd like advice on moving forward.

1. I had problems getting the sensors working initially. I had to set the Node ID's manually, which I believe is a limitation of OpenHAB. I also could not for the life of me get the measurement units to work in °F. I had to somehow manually set each node to send in °F as opposed to °C. I would like to have this work correctly if possible from the get-go.

2. I would like to battery power my arduino sensors. I plan to replace my current hardware with Arduino Pro Mini 3v (8MHz) with the low power mods done. The gateway will likely be run on a Nano instead of the UNO. My current goal is to have four types of sensors: (1) Temp/Humidity, (2) Servo - Blinds, (3) Door, (4) Light Level. I hope to have these all be able to run for an extended period of time on battery power only. The servo for blinds will probably be the most difficult to do this, however I have some ideas.

3. I would also like to be able to integrate other wireless technologies. I currently have an Aeon Labs Z-Stick 2 for Z-Wave devices (although I don't have any Z-Wave devices to test/use currently), and I have my eyes on a couple Zigbee devices that I would like to be able to incorporate. What is the best way to do this?

Any advice on how to move forward would be appreciated. It looks like there isn't a whole lot of activity in this forum, but many people who are using OpenHAB with MySensors. I'd love to get feedback before re-inventing something that is already done.

[mbj]

Some answers to your questions:

I have not found any way to make Openhab distribute node id's automatically, at least not for the Openhab 1.x versions. I use the current MySensors MQTT gateway together with Openhab and this gateway can issue node id's. But next release of the MySensors software will not support the current MQTT gateway so no reason for trying it. On the other hand, it is easy to set the node id's manually so why not continue doing that?

I am running the gateway on a nano, works fine. For battery powered sensors (I have just one now) I have used the Sensebender Micro which seems to consume very little power if correctly programmed (you can see a little more info here http://forum.mysensors.org/topic/2960/yet-another-mailbox ). For other options see for example https://www.mysensors.org/build/battery or similar advices available on the Internet.

I have a z-wave network connected to same Openhab as used for the MySensors items and it runs on a RPi. So Openhab is the glue between the various networks. I have never tried any ZigBee stuff and currently see no reason to use any because MySensors works great on NRF24 (and presumably great also on RFM69).

[moskovskiy82]

@mbj said:

But next release of the MySensors software will not support the current MQTT gateway

Any substitutions planned for that?

[mbj]

@moskovskiy82 You will find the discussion in the threads if searching. The current v1.5 gateway is a (rough) broker with some problems (even though mine has run well for a long time).

The next one is a MQTT client and is based on ESP8266 and is available from the development branch at GitHub. Using this you also need a broker, for example Mosquitto, somewhere in the network.

I have just installed Mosquitto at my Openhab RPi gateway and will start testing the WSP8266 MQTT gateway client one of these days. I have already run it for a few minutes and it worked so far.