💬 Building a Raspberry Pi Gateway

[Robert Król]

hi,
is it possible to conect NRF24 to SPI1 channel on RBpi3?
(i mean pins 26, 35, 36,38,40)??

[mfalkvidd]

Welcome to the forum @robert-król
I have not tried it myself, but I beleive https://forum.mysensors.org/post/76079 shows how to do it.

[barrydou]

Hello

Is it possible to redefine pin used for DI00 with rfm69 (with configure option for example) ?
Indeed, DI00 is on pin 22 on raspberry, and pin 2 on arduino.
But with NRF, pin 2 on arduino is for IRQ, which is connected to pin 15 on raspberry.

So if it was possible to force pin 15 for DI00, we could use adaptator card like this one https://www.mysensors.org/hardware/nrf2rfm69.

[Rolo6442u]

Hi, just build an Ethernet gateway on a raspberry pi B+ following the instructions on this site. And it works! I'm running raspbian stretch lite and used the master branch. No issues. I use the RFM69 radio and this gateway has the HW model. I did have to update al my nodes to use the new RFM69 drivers but that was clearly mentioned in the article.
I have two questions:

1. In this section :

log_pipe=0
log_pipe_file=/tmp/mysgw.pipe

Is this correct, I think there should be a 1 to enable this type of logging.

2. When a new version of mysensors is released, how do I update the gateway version on the raspberry pi?

And here is a picture of my work:

Thanks for the effort you put into this project!

[kted]

Has the issue with RFM automatic transmission control been addressed?

[Rolo6442u]

@kted Can you give me a pointer to the details of this issue? I'm willing to do some tests and report back my findings. Some info about my configuration, I have 5 nodes at this moment, all battery feeded, they are sending only nodes. They all work but they have a interval of several minutes between sending. The gateway is connected to Domoticz running on another Raspberry PI.

[kted]

@rolo6442u I built an Raspberry gateway using an RFM69 radio, to replace one built around a NodeMCU.
All nodes are transmit only, and using the latest stable API.
I noticed that all sensors were using max TX power after the first couple of transmissions, although they were respecting the ATC setting before, and were using minimum power most of the time.
Now I am concerned about battery life, so I switched back to the NodeMCU gateway, waiting for a fix.
I'll put together a temporary net, with a RPi0 gateway and a single node later, to show some real data, if you need any more information.

[Rolo6442u]

@kted I wil do some tests to check if I see this behavior. Just build a simple test node with a pushbutton, on 2 AA batteries. This node has the low power W radio module. How did you discover/measure that the max TX power was used?

[mfalkvidd]

@kted could be the same problem as discussed in https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/9796/rfm69-atc-not-working/

[kted]

@rolo6442u From what the node itself reports from transportGetSignalReport(SR_TX_POWER_PERCENT). It starts from say 50%, and after a coule of transmissions it goes up to 100%, when the nodes are 1m apart. When using a stand alone ESP8266 gateway, it drops to 0%.
I'll have the nodes ready in a couple of hours, after I come home from work...

[Rolo6442u]

Did some tests and I do see the TX power climbing to 100% after a few transmits :

-42 :transportGetReceivingRSSI()
127 :transportGetSendingRSSI()
-256 :transportGetReceivingSNR()
-256 :transportGetSendingSNR()
6 :transportGetTxPowerLevel()
77 :transportGetTxPowerPercent()
0 :transportInternalToRSSI(_transportSM.uplinkQualityRSSI)

-46 :transportGetReceivingRSSI()
-102 :transportGetSendingRSSI()
-256 :transportGetReceivingSNR()
-256 :transportGetSendingSNR()
7 :transportGetTxPowerLevel()
80 :transportGetTxPowerPercent()
0 :transportInternalToRSSI(_transportSM.uplinkQualityRSSI)

-47 :transportGetReceivingRSSI()
-102 :transportGetSendingRSSI()
-256 :transportGetReceivingSNR()
-256 :transportGetSendingSNR()
10 :transportGetTxPowerLevel()
90 :transportGetTxPowerPercent()
0 :transportInternalToRSSI(_transportSM.uplinkQualityRSSI)

-47 :transportGetReceivingRSSI()
-105 :transportGetSendingRSSI()
-256 :transportGetReceivingSNR()
-256 :transportGetSendingSNR()
11 :transportGetTxPowerLevel()
93 :transportGetTxPowerPercent()
0 :transportInternalToRSSI(_transportSM.uplinkQualityRSSI)

-47 :transportGetReceivingRSSI()
-103 :transportGetSendingRSSI()
-256 :transportGetReceivingSNR()
-256 :transportGetSendingSNR()
13 :transportGetTxPowerLevel()
100 :transportGetTxPowerPercent()
0 :transportInternalToRSSI(_transportSM.uplinkQualityRSSI)

-47 :transportGetReceivingRSSI()
-106 :transportGetSendingRSSI()
-256 :transportGetReceivingSNR()
-256 :transportGetSendingSNR()
13 :transportGetTxPowerLevel()
100 :transportGetTxPowerPercent()
0 :transportInternalToRSSI(_transportSM.uplinkQualityRSSI)

Not sure if this has a great impact on battery life, depends on how often the node sends a message. Al my nodes have an interval of about 10 minutes. I leave the gateway running for now. Having it running on this PI is a great advantage for me. Will try to do some current measurement on this node and calculate what the impact is on battery life.

[gohan]

@barrydou I gave a double gateway running on my raspberry both nrf24 and rfm69, still on v. 2.2

[kted]

@gohan Nice. I was thinking to do that same at some time, but I wasn't sure if the Raspberry could handle the load, since I also run domoticz on it, along with pi-hole.
How many devices do you have on each gateway?

[gohan]

I got the same, domoticz and pi hole, but the load of the gateway is minimal

[kted]

@gohan I meant multiple gateways on the same raspberry.
Right now, I have an NRF24L01 gateway, Domoticz, pi-hole, and a VPN server running, with 2 more gateways connected, one local and one remote RFM69 on ESP8266.
It would be nice if I could combine the two local gateways, the RFM and the NRF on the same Raspberry's GPIO...

[gohan]

Yes, I have both radios on the same raspberry.

[MasMat]

More problems when I try to "make" after configuring. Tried with and without sudo...

dietpi@Domoticz:~/MySensors$ sudo make
gcc -MT build/hal/architecture/Linux/drivers/core/log.o -MMD -MP -march=armv6zk -mtune=arm1176jzf-s -mfpu=vfp -mfloat-abi=hard -DMY_SIGNING_SIMPLE_PASSWD=\"ZZZZZZZ\" -DMY_RADIO_RF24 -DMY_GATEWAY_LINUX -DMY_GATEWAY_MQTT_CLIENT -DMY_DEBUG -DLINUX_SPI_BCM -DLINUX_ARCH_RASPBERRYPI -DMY_LINUX_CONFIG_FILE=\"/etc/mysensors.conf\" -DMY_DEFAULT_TX_LED_PIN=18 -DMY_DEFAULT_RX_LED_PIN=16 -DMY_DEFAULT_ERR_LED_PIN=12 -DMY_MQTT_CLIENT_ID=\"mygateway1\" -DMY_MQTT_SUBSCRIBE_TOPIC_PREFIX=\"mysensors-in\" -DMY_MQTT_PUBLISH_TOPIC_PREFIX=\"mysensors-out\" -DMY_MQTT_PASSWORD=\"YYYYY\" -DMY_MQTT_USER=\"XXXX\" -DMY_CONTROLLER_IP_ADDRESS=127,0,0,1 -DMY_DEBUG_VERBOSE_SIGNING -DMY_RX_MESSAGE_BUFFER_FEATURE -DMY_RF24_IRQ_PIN=15  -Ofast -g -Wall -Wextra  -I. -I./core -I./hal/architecture/Linux/drivers/core -I./hal/architecture/Linux/drivers/BCM -c hal/architecture/Linux/drivers/core/log.c -o build/hal/architecture/Linux/drivers/core/log.o
In file included from hal/architecture/Linux/drivers/core/log.c:20:0:
hal/architecture/Linux/drivers/core/log.h:24:19: fatal error: stdio.h: File not found
 #include <stdio.h>
                   ^
compilation terminated.
Makefile:102: recipe for target 'build/hal/architecture/Linux/drivers/core/log.o' failed
make: *** [build/hal/architecture/Linux/drivers/core/log.o] Error 1

EDIT: ...and here's the fix: "sudo apt-get install g++" (I'm using DietPi now to make it lighter for Pi Zero W).

[coza]

Running Version 2.3.2-beta just cloned today. On a raspberry pi B rev2.
A little bug/problem I have discovered with the MQTT gateway.

When you run the gateway with command and switch:-

mysgw -c /etc/mysensors.conf

It segfaults.

When its run with the command and switch :-

mysgw --config-file /etc/mysensors.conf

It works fine

I was playing with the ethernet gateway compile and the -c worked fine.

[coza]

Another thing I have found is I cannot get any logging working with the mqqt gateway compile.

It worked fine (named pipe) with the ethernet gateway compile.

Edit
It seems logging with the mqtt is not instant. It seem to dump the log out of memory periodically, is this expected? Makes it a bit hard to debug real-time.

[gohan]

Just use mqtt client