@NeverDie I am happy to report that my batteries arrived yesterday!

@NeverDie
I'm going to dissipate the energy through a 25 ohm resistor. It will take about 24 hours to perform one capacity test. Often times I read that the full capacity won't be available until after a few charge-discharge cycles. 2 resistors, 4 batteries, 3 tests each. Assuming that I stay on top of it, it will take at least a week of testing which won't start until I get my 25 ohm resistors. I'll post a link to my full write up.

OK, I did my battery test. @NeverDie @Nca78 @mfalkvidd
You can find it here

The batteries from Newegg and Fullbattery are good ones.

If you going to buy a large quantity and looking for a low price, then you should buy 1 or two and test them as I have done here. You might have to "kiss a lot of toads" before you find a good vendor, though.

OSD

@hubertus I'm not getting the description of you setup. Perhaps a sketch would be good?

Wen I need serial communication, with the Arduino, I use SoftwareSerial on two other I/O lines. That way I can debug real time, SoftwareSerial is slower but you're only doing temperature so 9600BAUD would be fin

Also, don't try to do too much at once. Break the task down into small, manageable sections. You have a lot of different things going on, get one thing going at a time.

OSD

I think it's pretty cool. I can hear my spousal unit asking, "What are you doing with all that data?"

-OSD

@eiten said in Saving last known good state, but not in EEPROM:

utility meter in home assistant

This is exactly what I am seeking! Thank you!

PS I truly enjoy reverse translating! It teaches me how to better understand my first language and it gives me alternate words to use in searches. So a second thank you!

"Regelmässiges Zurücksetzen" would be best translated to English in this context as "Periodic Reset". In the English version of Home Assistant it is called "Meter reset cycle" (I remember seeing "keep dry" translated as "do not take in shower with you"

@NeverDie I like your suggestion for solar panels, though my application only requires 1x 5W panel. And I like the idea of dismantling the power packs.

I think we differ in our approaches, though. I seem to enjoy living on the "bleeding edge", that is, I'm more of a risk taker. My first house solar system, 2.8kW, was installed in 2004. When I upgraded to 4.2kW, I took the 14 panels and installed them on my hillside, so now I'm a net energy exporter. The 2.8kW portion is still producing at 85% of nameplate, shows little environmental degradation (sealant, too), and has paid for itself. The reward outweighed the risk.

In taking risks, I learn much. Yes, I have a quite a few scars, actually and metaphorically. I have discovered a philosophy: Everything is an experiment. The point of an experiment is to learn something. So every experiment is a successful, just that sometimes the desired results are not realized. Eg. leaving an Arduino outdoors results in a short useful life. Spraying on a sealant extends the outdoor life.

Good discussion. Thanks for the ideas

OSD

@NeverDie

I'm new-ish to MySensors. I came here because I was looking for a gateway from RF24 to MQTT and I'm well on my way to getting the MySensors version to work.

Why isn't MySensors working? I find two things really frustrating. The documentation is spotty at best. It's taking me days to get as far as I have. When I write up my own procedure for my own documentation, I find it's maybe just 20 steps, but each step needs a detailed explanation. For example, through a lot of trial and error, I found that to turn on the relay in the relay with button example I had to publish a message of 1 to the MQTT topic mysensors-in/13/1/V_LIGHT/0/2. Only later did I find the Serial Protocol 2.x. But it does't show a V_LIGHT nor S_LIGHT. Yes, I figured out that example is out of date, but that's part of the point I'm trying to make. And how did my node ID become 13 and stay 13 when I press reset on the Arduino?

You can see more detail on my frustrations in the MQTT gateway discussion

Which segues into my other frustration. about documentation. Many members offering advice do not provide links to their statements. For example, in the MQTT gateway discussion:

gohangohan MOD 3 Sept 2017, 13:15
(at)Richard-van-der-Plas "Just clone the 2.2 dev instead of the stable, the rest is the same
(emphasis mine)

How does one do that? Particularly in a world where case is important and there are three different quote marks, (excuse me, one is sometimes known as a gravé) all with different meanings.

There are many like you @NeverDie who know MySensors in-and-out. I am an experienced hardware and software engineer, retired (one of the engineers that developed ink jet printing and one of the engineers that developed a navigation system for the 747) It's not like I don't have a fundamental understanding of what's going on here. I have yet to find a way to search the forum other than using google search.

Don't get me wrong, the MySensors concept is great and functions pretty well, but if it's not well documented, then it is useless. Then when someone asks a simple questions only to get an answer with no explanation of the how, the newbie and experienced alike don't bother with the forum because the forum offers no help, either.

We had a poster at HP (when it was a great company) "No job is done until the paperwork is complete" (image of person sitting on the toilet)

@NeverDie It is my understanding, though I can't wrap my head around it, that it is the length of the conductor that makes the antenna tuned to a certain frequency. If this is the case, you could run your antenna around the edge of your circular pcb which would make the effective radius only slightly bigger.

@Homer I suspect the lack of interest is because there isn't much in the way of support anymore. Worse yet, I just (12h56PDT, 8 Aug 25) tried to go to the home page and it was not available. @mfalkvidd is very knowledgeable and, like me, shows up from time to time.

I think MySensors is the best "frugal tech". You can build a plethora of sensors for under USD$5 (plus housing).

I like tasmotized ESP8266, too, but that uses WiFi. These are automatically configured by Home Assistant (with the Tasmota integration). Most home routers max out on WiFi connections at 20-25, though. ESP devices can be programmed with c++ using the Arduino IDE. When configured, they can be OTA (Over-The-Air) reprogrammable.

I am under the impression that an ESP device can be a gateway. This would require the device to have a radio (nRF24?) so that MySensors sensors can connect through it.

But, the process to configure the gateway is on the homepage of MySensors. I hope it comes back

I think all my gizmos are conspiring against me. This is just one of their ploys.

My gateway is running on an RPi 3B+. Integral to the gateway are three "sensors" for irrigation control. It receives 3 commands from Home Assistant: Zone, Runtime, and Start. The program translates these inputs into when and what relays to energize or de-energize.

There are six nRF24 nodes; four soil moisture sensors, a water flow meter and an energy meter.

All of this worked well but went to *@#!! while I was gone. The nodes worked fine (other than the usual problems with DIY stuff). It was the irrigation control that I couldn't figure out.

I disabled the service and ran mysgw from the command line instead of as a service so I could try to catch the problem. There was to much data and the problem and the problem seemed to go away. But back as a service, the irrigation control would stop (not the other devices), but when I restarted the service, all was fine (sudo systemctl restart mysgw) for a day.

I read the documentation about piping the output. This essentially makes the output available when running as a service. At some point the output would stop. I couldn't determine why it stopped and there was no timestamp with the output.

I installed the utility, ts, that would put a timestamp on the output stream. The stream would stop at midnight every midnight, but the service must have just restarted because mysgw was still running.

Now here's the weird part. The irrigation control is working.

Wait, Wait, Wait!

I just checked to see if mysgw was working. It wasn't! no output from mysgw, meaning all the devices were not working. systemctl status mysgw said it was running. I restarted the service and now it's running as expected.

Any ideas for me to try. Yes, I could run a cron job every day or every 8 hours, but I'd like to have it work without this crutch.

@TheoL that would probably be a hall effect sensor that draws in the microamp range. Per @KevinT 's circuit, it would draw 33mA full and 11.3mA empty, somewhere in between depending on the depth. MySensors and a controller like Home Assistant (with the MySensors Integration) can monitor the battery level as well as the level of the sensor.

I have exactly the same level sensor but not the controller. The level sensor output is essentially a variable resistor. When the float is at the top, the resistance is minimum, at the bottom, maximum. I have the 0-190 ohm sensor.

My "reader" is an ESP-12F (ESP8266). Put a 470 ohm resistor from 3.3V to the Analog input and one of the leads of the sensor and the other lead to ground. The program is Tasmota configured for analog input

I power it with this power supply.

Typically Tasmota devices use the MQTT method of delivering data. and is auto-configured in the Home Assistant controller.

This could could work great with an Arduino in the MySensors eco-sphere. The could would basically be: read analog, send.

@sandorhoffmann I hope there is someone that can answer your question.

But, I really recommend using DHCP. In that way, you can control all of your IPaddresses in one place, your DHCP server (almost always, your router)

The huge advantage of ESP devices over Arduino is the WiFi. You don't need a big library. The MAC address is hard coded at the factory. I'm not sure that you can change it, which you would want to do if a device failed and you need an EXACT replacement.

The downside of ESP is also the WiFi. Most home routers can only handle 20-30 WiFi devices My Asus routers start dropping WiFi devices resulting in difficult reconnects. The network becomes unusable. Because I have many ESP devices, I employed a Ubiquity access point that can handle 300 WiFi devices. The routers can handle 254 (253?) IP assignments, though some only allow 64 DHCP assignments.

There is a discussion on this forum someplace on the number of clients there can be in a MySensors network. In theory 254 (253?) is the max, though I am unaware if anyone has tested it. I use an RPi as my gateway and haven't had problems with too many devices. If one is considering a very large number I would recommend starting each sensors one at a time because the gateway way will assign the NodeID which gets written into location 0 of the EEPROM. Or burn a NodeID into the Arduino EEPROM before running the actual code.

bottom line, you didn't do anything wrong, its the nature of the beast.

@paede said in LGT8F328P and MySensors:

LGT8F328P

There are some instructions on this page? Here's another link that might be helpful.

I know nothing about this device other than the google search I just did on. Some red flags went up for me. The use of software for the third party board, and a newbie extoling its virtues. (astroturfing)

Even if you get it running, it may not work with MySensors. I bought three official Nano Every's with your same hopes and expectations. It claimed to be a direct replacement/upgrade. First, the MySensors nRF24 software did not work. Then I was unable to find a reliable way to put the Every into deep sleep.

I've had pretty good luck with the Nano clones on AliExpress. I'd recommend getting the RF Nano because the radio is built in. Before I put one into production, I spray it with electrical lacquer to prevent corrosion. That said, as with everything else you get on AliExpress, caveat emptor.

It will be appreciated if you get it working and present the details here as to how you did it.

-OSD

@sebastieng Thanks for letting us and future readers know.

-OSD

@nagelc I find that naming is a personal thing, though it should be consistent. For example, I had 9 devices, one of which was primary, and a controller. they were named, Rudolph, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen, and the controller, Reins.

While there is quite a discussion, names are what works for you. If your design is for someone else, then names that easily documented, while descriptive, are appropriate.

Reminds me of a joke. This woman had 13 children, 6 boys and 7 girls. All the boys' name were Bob, and the girls, Jill. When asked, "Why?", she responded, "At dinner time I only have to call two names." "But what if you want a specific one?" "Oh, then I call them by their last name."

If you give careful thought to your naming system, it will be easier for you to remember. Otherwise you have to review someone else's naming system regularly.

-OSD

@mfalkvidd Yes, I understand that 253 is the software limit. I was wondering about the hardware limit.

For example, my Asus router has a software limit of 253 devices. But when I get 20-25 WiFi devices trying to connect, the network goes haywire. (pun intended ) I am quite convinced that this is a hardware limitation of the router because the router has to carry some information about each connection.

If the gateway is dumb, that is, carries no information about any connection, then it could truly have 253 connections. After a bit of contemplation, I realize that the name, gateway, implies this.

If that is the case, it is good news for the DiY'er in that this very inexpensive and cheap hardware could stand in for a LoRaWAN, again, with a number of compromises.

Re: Gateways

Re: Gateways

I got interested in LoRaWAN(R). It actually looks much like MySensors, with long range radios. In fact, MySensors supports the rfm95 radio that is identical (?) to the LoRa radio.

So I built a MySensors Gateway with an rfm95 radio running on an ESP-12F (Arduino board Generic ESP8266 Module) and a MySensors relay node running on an ESP32 WR-32 Development Board (Arduino board DOIT ESP32 DEVKIT V1). I included Over-the-Air (OTA) code, which is quite handy when it works. I was pretty impressed with a range of 25m through five walls...the WiFi didn't go that far!

Here's the challenge, though. The ESP-12F does not have a lot of storage. Every "node" connecting to it will take a bit of that. How many nodes can attach to this gateway?

I don't think a MySensors rfm95 sensor network could compete with a LoRaWan(R) network on specs. But when a LoRa humidity/temperature sensor goes for € 44, I think a DiY'er could justify a few compromises.

@jaydenlord Probably you do. If you leave the EN floating, electrical noise could cause it to enable or disable randomly.

Some enable pin require a HIGH, some LOW. Connect it to VCC to see if it works more consistently. If it doesn't detect, connect it to GND.

If one of these works, then the part wasn't designed to be in a default state of enable.

Let us know your results (I found this video

OSD