I have published all the documentation in a Github repository. If someone wants to make PCBs, I recommend that you wait a little longer until you receive my PCBs and try them.
@scurb This looks very interesting and my factor now to save me from having to create my own :-). I have been planning to do the same thing (although maybe on a smaller software scale) by writing a simple Python server that would pull serial packets off of a gateway arduino (either running mysensors or something I write myself) and pipe this through MQTT to openHAB. I have two questions:
How do you interface with a sensor network? Do you go through a serial connection to read the serial packet format (a,b,c,d)? I see several implementations that put the mqtt client directly on the Arduino, but it seems much cheaper for me to just plug it into a USB port to get a virtual serial port instead of investing in a separate ethernet shield
How does an item configurations look like for a switch in openHAB? I'm looking to build a toggle switch which toggles light on or off every time it is activated, and I cannot really understand how to configure the switch to allow this behaviour for an mqtt input.
Feel free to take the second question with me directly since this might not be very interesting to the others in the forum
What about a vibration sensor? At least in my kitchen, the fans do produce a slight vibration to the metal roof thing.
They pretty cheap on Ebay, I must try it myself...
take care to have the good number of pin, some sketch use digital others analogic... I've ordered light sensors and sound sensors without analogic, I couldn't use them for my target use...
If you look at the Netatmo devices you can see that they have plastic caps and a long plastic notch. I'd bet that the antenna can be found in such an area...
I dont think that a small thickness will help to let the radio signal pass. Think of that very thin µ-metal sheet covers on high frequency circuits e.g. in TV or Radio inputs (where you want to stop a radio transmission). They are built to not let radio waves pass and they are thin - so I dont think the thickness plays a major role. As Bulldog wrote paramagnetic blocks radio waves. And aluminum stays paramagnetic even if you reduce the thickness.
But I made the experience that relatively small areas, where the radio waves will not get blocked (e.g. plastic caps) can make the difference between no signal and "its working". Also keep in mind that nearly all antennas have a direction. So changing the orienation of the antenna might dramatically change the transmitting capabilties.
