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

@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

Thanks for the reply.. It seems that if you can do what you did with the sensor code, presumably it should work with the gateway code, so I guess I just need to make some time to try some more.. Otherwise I think i'm just going to have to move back to a bigger arduino and just use an NRF and forget about the wifi on the new version..

Thanks!

Hi, I've got a working Arduino based garage door opener project that I'd like to connect to MySensors for monitoring and control..

It ran before on a plain Uno, with a wifi module that I can't remember the name of, which was in a Zigbee form factor, and was a serial Wifi interface.. I'm in the process, and almost done migrating to a new Sparkfun 8266 Thing Dev board so that the Wifi would be built in, and I could more easily socket the microcontroller to remove it without unwiring the whole thing from the garage when I need to make code changes, which is how my Arduino currently is..

SO.. My goal being that I want to monitor and control the door, I naturally thought I'd make a sensor node, but I dont have enough IO pins left over to support an NRF radio module, so I changed sights and decided to try to make it a WiFi gateway that would just report on itself, since it's already connected to my WiFi..

I thought I could just add:

#define MY_CONTROLLER_IP_ADDRESS 192, 168, 1, 185
#include <MySensors.h>

to my existing arduino project, and then hopefully add the code to register the devices and go from there, but it's not working.. I realize I dont know enough about the MySensors code to be able to retrofit my project like this. I've looked, but can't find anything that specifically talks about retrofitting an existing project like this.. Is there something out there that I'm missing? Any cookbook for the minimal required code to do so? If not, I think I'm at the point that I'm going to have to start over with the MySensors gateway sketch, and then import my "business logic" into it.. Maybe that's the easiest way??

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

@dbemowsk Any info on how your garage project went, and whether you used the roller shutter code? I'm in a similar situation now.. I've got an 8266 "Thing Devboard" (Sparkfun) based garage door controller that I'd like to integrate with MySensors.. Ultimately, I'd LOVE 2 things to show up on Vera: 1: an indication of state (open/closed/in motion) and a pushbutton to let me trigger the relay for open/close..

I originally started searching in here for a "pushbutton" type interface, since I didn't really want to use an on'/off switch type thing, since it was supposed to be momentary, but then I saw your post about a request for a real "garage door" plug in..

Just curious what you ended up doing..
-Steve