@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

@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

You write "...clicking is heard..." Is that a single click or a click click click ...?

After getting the LOW signal, wait a period of time and if it's still low, send the message that there is a flame. Likewise for a HIGH signal.

Perhaps instead of a relay, an opto-isolator?

@emre299 alas, this cool project seems to be abandoned.

@sindrome73 said in Pjon Script:

Pjon Protocol

The only way I see this working is that the remote device (non-gateway sensor) sends the data using the PJON protocol over whatever medium. The remote device would not use any MySensors code.

On the gateway, a "sensor" would be created that would receive the data using the PJON protocol over that medium. Once the data is received, it would be "sent" to the gateway portion of the code that is running on the gateway.

Thus, for every remote sensor there would have to be a "sensor" on the gateway. Sort of defeats the purpose of a gateway.

It would be nice if MySensors were media independent and PJON would be a good candidate. Alas, I don't believe there is sufficient support for MySensors these days to create that environment.

As far as someone creating these scripts, I would advise you do a deep dive into PJON. The first part would be to create the POJON "Hello World" pair. Once you have this working, then you could incorporate it into your MySensors gateway.

Let us know how it works out.

-OSD

@Homer That's really good to hear!

@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

@CodeGarage I am getting the message that www.mysensors.org is not responding (13h22 PDT 8 Aug 25) Is MySensors officially dead?

@Eme

Thank you for coming back to report how you solved your problem! Your comments will help other people.

I am a big fan of Frugal Tech and I think MySensors is great for that.

Alas, MySensors is not well supported anymore. Right now I'm having problems linking to the home page It's people like you and me that will keep MySensors going.

Thanks for your help.

OSD