Many thanks Mikael

I didnt know it was possible to have a gateway with the two options. That is very interesting and perhaps it may be the best solution for my project.
May be for the actuators/relays I can use esp8266 as I will anyway have a lot of power available from the wall plug power supplier. Also wifi access is something I am more familiar. RF is something I have not used before.
For the temperature sensors which are located close to the actuators/relays I can still reuse the same esp8266.
For the rest of the temperature sensors I can use nRF24L01+ with batteries and this will allow me to not have cables hanging around. In general I would prefer to not use batteries so I dont need to bother replacing them periodically, however, after looking at the product you mentioned (sensebender) it seems batteries will last very long time and it looks easy to set up.

Hello Mikael.

Thanks to your help, I am getting closer to my final solution for a heating control project of my appartment. I am thinking in choosing a location for my esp8266 gateway in a room close to some of my sensors and actuators which could then be wired directly to this esp8266 circuit. This gateway will also have a RF component attached "nRF24L01+" and this will allow RF communication with the rest of the nodes.
for any temperature sensor nodes which I cannot wire to the gateway I found very interesting the sensebender micro you mentioned in other post.
For the radiator valve actuator I find very interesting a video on using a relay posted by petewill. I am also trying to understand the section about "AC-DC double solid state relay module" posted by Aproxx and Hex. I guess that module is meant to be used by lights rather than a water valve actuator which is more like a motor. My valve actuators require 230v, uses a maximum of 5 wats and they just have on/off possition. I hope I could use something like this AC-DC double solid state relay.
I am looking forward to receive the pieces I ordered and start playing around.

Thanks again
Carlos

@thomas-schneider
Did you see the comments from Mikael?. Do you have the DHT library?.
What does the error say?

Great!!
Exactly what I needed!!.
I will look for a switch like that.
Many thanks
Carlos

Many thanks @parachutes and @Boots33

The valves I am controlling use AC, so for these components I dont worry about polarity.

I am having a look at @Boots33 diagram and I think you found exactly what I need. So it is simpler and cheaper than the one I initially thought. I appreciate your imput.
I have seen online some cheap switches with three positions and three terminals ("on/off/on" switch). If I understand correctly, this is what you are suggesting in the diagram. I mean the midle possition leaves all terminals unconnected. This midle possition would mean in my case a "manual mode set to off". The other two possitions being: "manual mode set to on", and the last one "Auto mode" (controlled with domoticz + mysensors + relay).

By the way what solfware did you use to make the diagram?. It looks very good to share drawings with other people.

Carlos

I was looking for examples on mysensors 2.0 having several sensors in the same node and this sketch looks very iteresting.
Thanks

Hello
Thanks again for the coninuous support.
I am setting up my home automation system to control radiator valves and I would like to have the possibility to manually override the operation of any radiator valve at any time.
I found some discussions about this subject but most of them had different requirements than my project.
When the manual mode is selected I would like this to always have preference over any controller or sofware settings. If there is any sofware or hardware issue I still want to be able to quicky switch on or off the radiator valve (to not get frozen while I debug or fix something :-)). This is also important for other people at home in the event of an issue in the host where the controlling is running. I dont want them to wait for me to go back home to re-boot operating system, etc.
It is also very important to me to be able to set the system back to automatic mode quickly without having to reprogram/ reconfigure or re-initialise anything. I say this because I have seen very interesting solutions which allow manual override by "inverting wires" or inverting control signal, but later on, this could cause that controller may think the radiator is "off" when it is realy "on" (not good).

So far I am considering the option of using a 2 pole 3 throw togle switch.
I made a diagram below and I would appreciate any suggestions or feedback about it.
This setting would allow 3 options:

1. set the radiator manually to to on
2. set it to off
3. set the system to be managed automatically by the relay (which will be attached to arduino as part of a mysensors node).
   As a possible alternative I also though about using two single switches because that hardware would probably be cheaper and easier to find but still my preffered solution would be (if possible) to only use one button.

Many thanks
Best regards
Carlos

Hello Mikael.

Thanks to your help, I am getting closer to my final solution for a heating control project of my appartment. I am thinking in choosing a location for my esp8266 gateway in a room close to some of my sensors and actuators which could then be wired directly to this esp8266 circuit. This gateway will also have a RF component attached "nRF24L01+" and this will allow RF communication with the rest of the nodes.
for any temperature sensor nodes which I cannot wire to the gateway I found very interesting the sensebender micro you mentioned in other post.
For the radiator valve actuator I find very interesting a video on using a relay posted by petewill. I am also trying to understand the section about "AC-DC double solid state relay module" posted by Aproxx and Hex. I guess that module is meant to be used by lights rather than a water valve actuator which is more like a motor. My valve actuators require 230v, uses a maximum of 5 wats and they just have on/off possition. I hope I could use something like this AC-DC double solid state relay.
I am looking forward to receive the pieces I ordered and start playing around.

Thanks again
Carlos

Hello

I am trying to learn about mysensors architecture and I am a bit confused about what the role of esp8266 module is.

When I had a first look at this site I understood that gateway and nodes use RF to send and receive mesagges. However I initially though it was also posible to alternativelly set up a node to use esp8266 to have wifi comunication with mysensors esp8266 gateway.

After reading more on this site, my current understanding is that communication between mysensors nodes and gateway should be done with RF and not wifi.
So, if I understand correctly, esp8266 could allow us to do things like the following:

1. Toguether with a RF module we can build a mysensors serial gateway. So esp8266 is used by the gateway to have wifi communication with controler (not nodes) while the gateway uses the RF module to communicate with the nodes. There are plenty of controllers which will support this mysensors gateway.
2. Used alone in the node, the esp8266 could comunicate directly with the controler but this will baypass the mysensors gateway and mysensors RF network. Depending on the controller we chose we may, or may not, have support for this kind of direct comunication without having a gateway in the middle.

Is my current understanding correct?.

Many thanks
Best regards
Carlos

Many thanks Mikael

I didnt know it was possible to have a gateway with the two options. That is very interesting and perhaps it may be the best solution for my project.
May be for the actuators/relays I can use esp8266 as I will anyway have a lot of power available from the wall plug power supplier. Also wifi access is something I am more familiar. RF is something I have not used before.
For the temperature sensors which are located close to the actuators/relays I can still reuse the same esp8266.
For the rest of the temperature sensors I can use nRF24L01+ with batteries and this will allow me to not have cables hanging around. In general I would prefer to not use batteries so I dont need to bother replacing them periodically, however, after looking at the product you mentioned (sensebender) it seems batteries will last very long time and it looks easy to set up.

Hello

First at all I would like to thank you for the great site, the software and the getting started videos.

This is my first post in this site. I am used to work with Arduino, sensors, motors, etc. but I am new to Home Automation systems.

I need remote access to some sensors and relays for a heating system and I am considering two alternatives to build the nodes:

• arduino nano + nRF24L01 + sensor/relay
• esp8266 + sensor/relay

Let me ask my questions directly and then, later below I will give more details on my specific project.

1. What could be easier to set up and get it working?
2. What could work better in terms of less interferences from other systems or into other systems?
3. What could be more durable in time (don’t want to replace parts or have to fix problems very often).
4. Which one do you think it will be used more in the future or could have more support in the future?

I think factors like money, distance between nodes and power requirements may not be limiting factors for my specific project because both alternatives are reasonable cheap, I leave in a small flat (small distances) and I am not planning to use replaceable batteries in my nodes (will use wall plug power suppliers for the nodes).

If there is something else, I should be considering or a better third alternative please let me know.

I provide below details on what I will use this for:

I want to automate the hot water heating system in my flat. Also in the future, I would like to control some lights, motorise some blinds/curtains, etc but at the moment I am focused on heating system.
More specifically I would like to control a motorised valve of every radiator of my house based on a predefined weekly program plus information from temperature sensors plus possibility of overwriting program manually at any time by connecting to a web site (may be using domoticz or similar).

I think I have almost all hardware I need at the moment to start doing a prove of concept of the heating system except for the communications parts of sensors and actuators which I am not really sure.
I followed the links of mysensors store and I have just ordered a few pieces of both esp8266 and nRF24L01+. That section of the site is very useful to make sure I get the right thing.

Many thanks