@ncollins It is possible to use NRF51822 for gateways with serial. I am using it for many months now. We need USB to serial adapter.
Also, I do not use JLink or ST-Link for flashing the NRF51 chips. I use raspberry pi with OpenOCD.
OpenOCD setup can be overwhelming (it was for me) but I have been able to make it work and replicate for a while now. If someone needs inputs, I am happy to help. Ask here or reach out to me on discord @ Puneit#2433

For the very reason you stated - hardware bugs in NR51 chips leading to high power-consumption - they make compact repeater nodes / powered nodes with repeaters.

@jamzm From what I understood is that a Fing box is an interface device which adds to your router and it is something related to the WiFi network.

I am no expert - -still loads to learn but then I think there is some disconnect. While the Mysensors network does work on the 2.4GHz frequency range (through the NRF24 or NRF5 radios), the network is an ISM band network and not a WiFi standard. Therefore you need to add a gateway from the door sensor to your network.

Take a look at the Getting Started and Build pages.

The minimum you need is a arduino board of your choice with a radio of your choice for the sensor; an arduino/esp8266 of your choice and the same radio for the gateway and a controller of your choice as well.

Had I been starting and someone asked me to choose a bunch of stuff, I would get scared. So I will tell you what I use.. its just one of the implementations.

For the sensors I use arduino pro mini 3.3v with NRF24L01 and I am experimenting with NRF51822 (stay away from these)
For the gateway, I use an arduino uno with NRF24l01 with an ethernet shield running MQTT gateway
For the controller I use Home Assistant.

Now for the sensor itself - if you want to DIY the same, then I would do it this way (again different people would have different methods)

Use arduino pro-mini with NRF24l01 and a reed-switch. 3D print the case for it and use it.

I hope I was able to help in some manner.

I have said this before (I do not know where) but here it is again.
One of the reasons that MySensors didn't become as popular as other frameworks is because it somewhat matured before YouTubers were popular. Today, fewer people like to read, and most like to watch a YouTube video sitting on the toilet. The YouTubers not only provide step by step instructions, they do live streams and then there are Discord servers.

I myself manage a small discord server on Home Automation and I see everyday newbies coming in and they are looking for a magical cheap solution which somehow works.
The barrier for entry into MySensors is big (involves a lot more wires, it does not seem sexy, no one talks about it on YouTube). On the other hand, everyone has an ISP given All-In-One router+AP+DHCP server and ESPs simply connect to them. Everyday Amazon, AliExpress etc are flooding the market with Wifi based products, so the time for feeling of gratification is very small. You buy, plug in, use the app and it works

That said, we do have a dedicated MySensors channel on our discord server and I have been pushing (literally) people to try MySensors. Serious DIYers are still interested and I have successfully introduced 4 people to it, 2 have started using it.

I won't call the Mysensors a stagnant or dying breed but the concept of forums in my opinion is. Forums are still the most structured support system (I am not saying otherwise) but many people want instant answers, - they do not want to make the effort asking a good question. And across many forums which have been there for a few years, a common answer is "search before you ask".

This is my two cents on this topic

Home assistant has a docker container which talks nicely with a mysensors serial gateway connected via USB on a Dell machine.

 homeassistant:
    container_name: hass
    image: homeassistant/home-assistant:stable
    volumes:
      - /home/server/homeassistant/:/config
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
    restart: unless-stopped
    devices:
      - /dev/ttyUSB0:/dev/ttyUSB0:rwm
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://127.0.0.1:8123"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 6
    network_mode: host
    depends_on: 
      - mosquitto

the following line enables serial gateway into HA and then in the latest release 2021.3 one can add Mysensors from UI

devices:
      - /dev/ttyUSB0:/dev/ttyUSB0:rwm

@jkandasa I am yet to use to Serial2Mqtt in order to test this out without breaking my current setup.. I will do it and share my feedback. I would definitely want to run Mycontroller in parallel to HA.

You can upload Mysensors sketch to NRF5 modules and that way it can speak to mysensors network and then communicate to your controller through the gateway

Thank you so much!

@sundberg84 I used a 3904 transistor between the relay and arduino and it works just fine with 3.3 V Arduino pro mini 8 HMz.
(2N2222 also works, but I have many pieces of 3904 and just a few 2N2222, hence using 3904)

@ncollins Yes, it is very easy to (re)deploy a whole system using the docker compose files.
I have 4 splits --- one being my core containers , Homeassistant, Nodered, Mosquitto, etc and then one of them being "applications that I don't need but have".. I recently had to redeploy and my core stack was running in under 10 minutes..

It is a very powerful tool.

@tBS I think I am in the same boat as you. Well, I started with MySensors few years ago and then shifted most of my stuff to Esp8266 - Tasmota and ESPHome. I am rebooting this project personally for me.

Yet, I feel somehow MySensors is a better implementation in terms of its mesh capabilities and repeater function.
And it is easier to make MySensors battery operated. NRF24 or NRF5x are more efficient power wise as compared to ESP8266 or ESP32.
That said, I think what we lack in this project (and if I am unable to find, maybe someone can point it out) are YouTubers like Drzzs of Home Assistant.

I have a Telegram group of Home Automation users in India and off-late I have been pushing this project on my group. We are in the midst of a lockdown, hence we cannot source parts for now.
That said, I think while you could be late in the game - a lot of development has happened and bugs were ironed out.
I am extremely happy to help as much as I can. I am no expert - so most likely I won't have the answers. I believe two heads are better than one so we can work things out together.

Cheers!

I have said this before (I do not know where) but here it is again.
One of the reasons that MySensors didn't become as popular as other frameworks is because it somewhat matured before YouTubers were popular. Today, fewer people like to read, and most like to watch a YouTube video sitting on the toilet. The YouTubers not only provide step by step instructions, they do live streams and then there are Discord servers.

I myself manage a small discord server on Home Automation and I see everyday newbies coming in and they are looking for a magical cheap solution which somehow works.
The barrier for entry into MySensors is big (involves a lot more wires, it does not seem sexy, no one talks about it on YouTube). On the other hand, everyone has an ISP given All-In-One router+AP+DHCP server and ESPs simply connect to them. Everyday Amazon, AliExpress etc are flooding the market with Wifi based products, so the time for feeling of gratification is very small. You buy, plug in, use the app and it works

That said, we do have a dedicated MySensors channel on our discord server and I have been pushing (literally) people to try MySensors. Serious DIYers are still interested and I have successfully introduced 4 people to it, 2 have started using it.

I won't call the Mysensors a stagnant or dying breed but the concept of forums in my opinion is. Forums are still the most structured support system (I am not saying otherwise) but many people want instant answers, - they do not want to make the effort asking a good question. And across many forums which have been there for a few years, a common answer is "search before you ask".

This is my two cents on this topic

I moved from keepass to Bitwarden self hosted. For a while I used both in parallel and now I have fully moved to Bitwarden self hosted. It integrates very well with everything- iOS, Safari on Mac and other browsers

@NeverDie creating VLANs and restricting access of the IOT devices to must have access is the method I follow.

@jkandasa I am yet to use to Serial2Mqtt in order to test this out without breaking my current setup.. I will do it and share my feedback. I would definitely want to run Mycontroller in parallel to HA.

@NeverDie MySensors via UI came in this release 2021.3. Prior to that it was through an entry (very simple one) in configuration.yaml.

If you have cameras, 3D printer (running Klipper) - all that can come into HA. And Homekit via HA works great as well.

@NeverDie VM install is one with the supervisor.. yes this is what I was referring to. VM is one of the supported methods, I guess

@NeverDie While I never used proxmox or VM, I did use the supervised install on Linux and then moved away from it. The advantage of supervised install is that you get the addon store but the disadvantage is that Supervisors starts to complain and moan as you install more containers on the host system.
It then stops you from upgrading to latest versions and prevents addons to be updated. At that stage I decided to move away from a supervised install.

@Ron @Anticimex The radio stops at 1.9V.. so I think its fair to do a BOD of 1.8V.

I used arduinoAsISP to burn bootloader and this is my platformio.ini

[env:program_via_ArduinoISP]
platform = atmelavr
framework = arduino
;  Serial bootloader protocol
upload_protocol = custom
; Serial upload port
upload_port = /dev/cu.*
; Get upload baud rate defined in the fuses_bootloader environment
upload_speed = 19200
board_build.f_cpu = 8000000L
board_hardware.oscillator = internal
board_hardware.uart = uart0
board_hardware.bod = 1.8v
board_hardware.eesave = yes
board_hardware.ckout = no
upload_flags =
    -C
    ; use "tool-avrdude-megaavr" for the atmelmegaavr platform
    /Users/puneit/Nextcloud/PlatformIO/bootloader/tool-avrdude/avrdude2.conf
    -p
    $BOARD_MCU
    -P
    $UPLOAD_PORT
    -b
    $UPLOAD_SPEED
    -c
    stk500
upload_command = avrdude $UPLOAD_FLAGS -U flash:w:$SOURCE:i

@ncollins Yes, it is very easy to (re)deploy a whole system using the docker compose files.
I have 4 splits --- one being my core containers , Homeassistant, Nodered, Mosquitto, etc and then one of them being "applications that I don't need but have".. I recently had to redeploy and my core stack was running in under 10 minutes..

It is a very powerful tool.

Hi great design... If I can suggest one improvement, it would be to burn a minicore bootloader and set BOD to 1.8V so that the batteries can last longer.