What am I missing here?

[Apocrathia]

@sundberg84 I am also going to buy another 10 pack of radios from the eBay seller linked on the MySensors Store, but I am under a time constraint right now and needed something sooner. Hopefully, it is a hardware issue, and hopefully any problems that I have experienced can help someone else. The information about the knockoff radios definitely needs to be put somewhere on the "Connecting the Radio" page of the main project site. That way people are more aware of the presence of these knock-off radios.

I will post an update once I have my new hardware in (should be tomorrow), and then once I have my project submitted, I will also post the documentation to the "My Project" section of the forum. Hopefully, some of the information will be useful and can be contributed to the main project.

[Apocrathia]

Got the new radios in today from the Amazon link posted earlier. EVERYTHING WORKS

I literally plugged everything in, hit the inclusion button, restarted the sensors, and BOOM, I started seeing data on both ends. The sensors are already populated into Domoticz, and working like a champ!

So, overall lesson here: There are entirely too many fake radios out there. I would like to hope that the people in charge of keeping the MySensors store up to date are verifying the eBay vendors they link to, but I have 10 completely bogus radios now that I get to trash.

Thank you guys so much for your help. Time to move on to building some more sensors!

[Dwalt]

@Apocrathia
I have bought two batches of ten radios from the prior vendor listed in the store (alice1101983) and all twenty radios were clones using conterfeit nrf24 chips. The serial numbers on the chips were identified elsewhere on the internet as known fakes. However, all but one of these fakes have worked flawlessly in my setup. Actually, I shouldn't say 'flawlessly' because I can't determine if they perform better or worse than true Nordic chip radios. I get decent indoor range, few transmission 'fails', and no battery drain issues. No complaints for the price.

That being said, I don't know if anyone can identify a true Nordic radio vendor in the Chinese marketplace and the Amazon vendors are just Chinese product resellers. If you pay less than $5 per radio, it is likely a counterfeit. If you pay more than $5 per radio, it is likely a marked-up counterfeit. The best recourse IMHO, is to use well rated vendors with a long seller history, they have reputations to protect. They will usually only sell truly authentic counterfeits.😉
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[Apocrathia]

@Dwalt After looking through my parts bin, I found one other radio that I already had (I guess I bought 1 and then 10 in two separate orders), and it had the white printings on the board. The other main thing I noticed is that the counterfeit boards had black epoxy over the actual chip, probably to hide the fact that it is a fake.

Obviously, everything is made in China, and not everything is going to be genuine. Hell, the radios I linked from Amazon and that just worked from me aren't even genuine. But they work. That's all I care about at this point. I'm going to take a shot at buying another batch of 10 radios from the vendor listed on the store at this moment (axeprice). Hopefully, I don't get ripped off again, but it looks like the seller that I originally bought the radios from back in 2014 (Yeah, I tried out this project once, but was in an apartment and didn't really have a use case for it yet) is no longer an eBay user. That says something in itself.

I would really like to see a better procured source, but I'm just happy that everything is working now.

[AWI]

@Apocrathia I am happy for you that it is finally working. :+1: The "fake" radio's should not frustrate the MySensors project. Until now I haven't had problems with the SMD versions..