Well.. My initial use is for a pool temperature / level sensor.. The temp is easy - It's registering as a V_TEMP and working great, but what I want is for the level to say "1.5 inches low" or "2 inches high", etc.. I currently have the value implemented as another V_TEMP, and have my arduino code calibrating the code to show 0 degrees if it's "perfect" and then plus/minus one degree for each inch the pool is high or low, but to have a sensor that is named "Pool level" and the data being "1.5 degrees F" isn't intuitive. I thought about using a distance sensor, but I couldn't get the distance code to work in the first place, and then I'd have to just remember what "distance" is normal (ie: is 0 the "top" of the pool, the the distance represents how far down the water is?) It just seems simpler in many cases to have a few english words displayed in the Vera website.

Another idea I have is to replace all my "expensive" z-wave door sensors with MySensors on Pro Mini because I hate that the output of the door sensor is just a picture of the door sensor with the "rainbow" on top either colored red, or not, and I have to remember which color is "open". I'd rather have a Vera output that just says "OPEN" or "CLOSED" and I can't figure out any way to do that with the regular sensors so I was just going to build my own..

I'm sure I'll think of more, but that's enough to keep me busy for a while!
.. didn't get to try any of this last night as I had hoped.. we ended up going to the town carnival instead... Will try again tonight!
-Steve

@hek Is that because it's meant to ONLY be used in the development branch, or is it a new feature that just hasn't made it to the stable branch yet?

@fleshfear said:

sorry to ask, but how do you down grade?

In your arduino IDE.. Choose Tools, Board, and at the top of the list, choose board manager, click in the window for "Arduino AVR Boards" and it will give you a pull-down for 'version' in the bottom left. Choose your 1.16.11 version, and click install..

This worked for me.. Maybe there's a newer one now with the bug fixed, but for me this older one works!
Good luck!!
Steve

Do yourself a favor and look up Ben Eater on Youtube.. Ben has a series of videos explaining computers starting at the digital logic gates and builds a complete but minimalistic microprocessor out of simple logic chips, and then walks through writing a small program (the computer only has a few bytes of RAM!) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2565dvjafglHU Then, he also has another series that expands upon this and uses 80's era parts which are still available to build a simple computer with more capability. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypFbtuVMUVXNR0z1mu7dp7eH Best of all, he sells kits that you can get to "play along" and build with him. The videos are amazing for a beginner or an experienced viewer. I've been a computer geek since the very early 80s and yet I really had no idea what the "microcode" in a CPU did until watching these videos. He explains things so well!

@Anticimex I 100% agree on the "totally protected" but since the issue, at least as far as protecting from the "kiddie toy" that was the subject of the original thread, I'm just saying to ONLY add a cheap level of protection that would prevent a basic record/playback of a valid signal, I'd think this would work... for free.. I totally get that a real signature system would be better, but at a significant cost and effort.
I dont know the bits and bytes of MySensors well, but I took as implication from the discussion that decryption of the packet wasn't the primary concern against this particular attack because you're right - If you can decrypt, it's over, especially if it's a single shared key amongst all the devices..

@NeverDie Is a signing chip really necessary?
If the packets are truly encrypted, and the hack you're trying to foil is a simple replay attack, I would think that including a simple incrementing counter into the message would do it. All the receiver would have to do is to only accept decrypted messages with a counter number GREATER than the last one it received. This should be simple to do if the encryption/decryption is already considered relatively secure?

@dbemowsk said:

@172pilot So you don't have the node set to close the door at a certain time of the day?

Nope.. My current system was an old arduino uno based thing that I only did for the RFID and auto-close timer.. I've never successfully gotten one integrated with Vera or MySensors so it really hasn't been an option.. I probably will once I get all this done.. Hopefully as a Vera Scheduled event

@dbemowsk said:

@172pilot I like your idea of putting the timer logic on the node itself, but do you have a way to set that from Vera? If not, I would have to reprogram the node if I ever wanted to change that.

I have the timer hardcoded in the node to 3 minutes, but I have a button that disables the timer until the next time the door is closed, which is how the one I've been using for the last 6 years works, but the new version I'm working on, I'm thinking of also making it so that if I manually stop the door between the limits, it wont start the timer..

@RoushRS3 said:

@dbemowsk
Hi there I built a garage door opener sensor using the "Relay Actuator" sensor from the "Built" section ,

Yeah.. With that, it's just a device to open/close your door, right? Can you use that to detect the state of the door? (open/closed) And as for the button, yeah.. I haven't looked hard, but I think a "doorbell' kind of device object would be perfect, but I haven't seen that..

Ultimately, a full implementation of a garage door object would be awesome.. I just wish I knew where to start..

@dbemowsk I'm on a VeraLite controller, but have been thinking of switching to the plus too.. Having the object type defined in MySensors and Vera would be very nice, but that is beyond anything I've done in either environment.. I'd love to learn though, so if there's any way to contribute, I'm all ears.. forcing garage door functionality into a 'switch' type object just doesn't quite fit the bill..

One difference between your concept and mine I guess is that my close door timer logic is built into the sensor itself... I didn't want any communication problem with a controller to accidentally leave the garage open. If the sensor is working, it is self sufficient.. One other thing I didn't mention is that I've got an RFID reader on it so that I can open the door with an RFID token.. Not sure how or if this would fit in to a garage door object.. In a perfect world, I'd love to manage the list of active tokens on the host side, so it might make sense to have the RFID section defined as a separate device that then remotely triggers a garage open event..

All this activity on the thread has inspired me to bring back up my old code and check it out after 3 months of walking away, and I think I may have found my reboot problem - I think I'm using the generic softwareserial to read the RFID reader.. I think there's a specific ESP SoftSerial module that may work better.. Maybe I'm tripping the WDT.

If there's a place to post my code for comment or inclusion into someone else's code, I'd be happy to do so.. It's messy but maybe having others look at it will help, and/or someone who is more famliar with the MySensors stuff can help put in the hooks to the controller. Right now, I have removed all the MySensors stuff for troubleshooting my basic functionality and reboots..

@dbemowsk said:

@Redguy That is why I proposed the 5 states (open, closed, opening, closing, and obstruction).

That sounds like exactly what I wanted, except that because I wanted to always have an automatic close timer, I decided to take the short cut that if the door wasn't fully opened or closed (neither sensor tripped) the code would basically go idle, so that if I set the door just a little bit lower than fully opened (manually stopping ir) that would be my easy override for the auto-close code, and assuming I hadn't manually interfered, the door would eventually be fully closed or open again.. If it found an obstruction and auto-opened, then being in the open state again would start the auto-close timer.. So, for example if I come home, and close the garage and go in the house, but the cat breaks the beam on the way down, it would automatically attempt to re-close after the standard 3 minute timer..

I hadn't considered trying to determine if that happened, but I guess if I added enough code to remember if the last state was open or closed, it would be easy to figure out if the close action was aborted..

Anyway.. Do you have working code?? I think mine actually does work, but I'm just having the 8266 reboot problem for some reason.. I haven't touched it since maybe September, but I should really get it back out and finish this thing up!!
-Steve

@Redguy Yeah.. that sounds like the roller shutter code would be good for that.. For mine, although I havent had time to finish it, my logic was that I had a sensor for completely up and one for completely down, and if neither was tripped, I just considered it "in motion".. I did this because I wanted a timer so that if the door was left open for more than a few minutes, it would automatically close... If I am working in the garage, I would just manually press the button to lower the garage door an inch or two, which would tell my sensor NOT to automatically close, because it's already in motion..

All of my recent troubleshooting has been because for some reason my 8266 seems to want to reboot randomly (sometimes once an hour, sometimes once a day) and when that happens, it triggers the IO pin and opens the garage.. In practice, it would auto-close, but it's still not a good idea for my garage to be opening randomly!

@fleshfear said:

sorry to ask, but how do you down grade?

In your arduino IDE.. Choose Tools, Board, and at the top of the list, choose board manager, click in the window for "Arduino AVR Boards" and it will give you a pull-down for 'version' in the bottom left. Choose your 1.16.11 version, and click install..

This worked for me.. Maybe there's a newer one now with the bug fixed, but for me this older one works!
Good luck!!
Steve