Not really understanding how my sensors is working.. :(
-
Hi everyone,
first, sorry for my bad bad English...
Since one year I was working on my own sensor network with arduinomega+ethernetshield+nrf24 as gateway and some nodes around my house. The gateway is connected to my router and I can reach it from remote trough http, it's a big project for me and not problemless, bugs, etc...Expecially because I don't have a app for my phone, but just a http page to communicate with the gateway... Yesterday I found MySensors.org and I said "WOW! I can abandon my "too big" project and use mysensors, but I guess I am not understanding something, especially the part of controllers, do I need it anyway? My internet connection has a static IP and I can reach my router from remote without use some "foreign" servers and accounts. Is there a app able to connect to the mysensors gateway bypassing the controller? You would say I'am really confused, maybe because I'am not understanding what does a controller do. If the mysensors-gateway is wired to my router, where is the place of the controller??
Sorry, I guess my questions has probably no sense, but I will be very happy if somebody can explain me the right way :)
Thanks everybody!
Gianni -
Yes, you will need a controller.
(This is not 100% true, but doing that requires deep insight how things wort, as far as I understood).
The controller just has to have a connection to the GW - see different GW types on the MySensors page. So for you easiest way would be to convert your mega to an EthernetGateway. Which one to choose may be not easy, but most of them will not need high end hardware (seems many can run on a raspberry or similar). -
In most home automation scenarios you usually have a (locally installed) controller software where you act on incoming data from the sensors deployed in your home.
With "act" I mean everything from logging data (for graphing) to automatically send out commands to actors.
I.e. If movement is detected (by a motion sensor) in a room after sunset then turn on ceiling light for two minutes.So... the controller holds all the "rules" in your building automation setup.
You can have a very small MySensors setup where sensors/actors send messages between each other and the "rules" is hardcoded in the nodes. But this will soon get very messy to maintain. You'd need at least one Relay node to get this working (with hard-coded id's in the nodes).
The controllers can often run headless on simple hardware like Raspberry. Check out our list of supported controllers.
