Best posts made by Anduril

in your IDE go to tools -> boards: "..." -> board manager and there select Arduino AVR board in the correct version.

Hey there,

I'm planing to use mysensors a litte 'off-label':
instead of monitoring sensors I try to build a counting system for sports. My brother is organizing sports tournaments with several matches running simultaneous. At the moment I'm trying to get the electronics working, but thats another point.
We want to see the status of all matches at a central laptop and get the final status (points, statistics,...) after the match has finished. He has a software doing the organisation of players, matchmaking and online statistics. This data might get exported as xml or similar (has to be discussed with the software developer yet).
My idea was to get a controller that is able to store a big amount of string entries for the database (player names) and the matches to play all imported from xml (maybe with some kind of import script?). Then the controller should be able to start a specific match (with unique ID) at one specific node (counting unit at the playside). Optional it would also transfer some strings maybe for announcement ("Player 1 vs Player 2 --- game starts") on the display of the unit.
As I don't know most of the controllers my question is if there is one (or more) capable of doing something like that? I know transmitting points is not the problem, thats just sending integers. I think the tricky thing is assigning a match ID to a node and get the reported points back to the right match.
I'm using pimatic at the moment and could not thing about a solution with this controller. I though about having one device for each match with associated string entries for names and integer values for points, but getting the data from the node (wich is running one match at a time) to the correct match seems difficult to me. If someone knows a good way that would be fine, as I know how to use pimatic and it has good scripting support.

Best would be if this controller is running on windows, so it could run on the already existing laptop. If it's linux only I would have to add a RPi and connect to that.

I'm grateful for any kind of tips/hints.

@ndiwan you can check what kind of usb interface chip your nano clone uses: look at the bottom side of your nano, there should be only one chip. If it is a ch340 you will need the drivers given by Al.

ok, what is the behavior if there is no ACK coming back? Trying again for several times before discarding the message? How long is the timeout?

@robosensor you could try nodered. It can connect multiple inputs (mqtt, tcp,...) and merge it to a single serial output and vice versa. You might have to add some logic, but that shouldn't be a problem.

Could you please post the versions of your ESP8266 library and MySensors library? As mfalkvidd said I had a similar problem and could fix it with newest versions for the ESP8266 gateway (no need to upgrade the nodes if not wanted).

OK i found the problem, I misunderstood something. I thought I have to add the keys to the enabling command of USER_SOFT_KEY. but there are the real keys some lines below that with correct example how to look like. Now it works and I personalized my first node. Thanks a lot @Anticimex

to my last knowledge this feature is implemented but not working. If you want to see the serial monitor you have to connect physically.

@mfalkvidd you have to open pcbnew pcb designer first. That's the third icon in the row on the right side of your screenshot.

I updated my gateway to newest dev version and now my nodes are communicating correctly (not updated, still 1.5.3). So the problem seems to be gone in 2.0, but I think it would still be nice to know what caused it for those not willing to upgrade to dev branch.
For @netram and @kr0815 (and maybe others) who had similiar problems: dev branch fixes this issue.

@signal15 well there is a doc about OTA here. I discussed this topic with tekka, who is the author of the GatewayESP8266OTA example in the mysensors lib here.
It took me some time to get this working, but now I can upload new firmware to my ESP using wifi. Only drawback is that is seems to be not compatible with the mqtt version of the gateway. At least I was not able to get this working and stopped on that.
If you have further questions, don't hesitate to ask.

well I did some further testing... sending e.g. 65000 from the node to the controller works, sending back 65001 does not. That seems more related to the controller (MyController) than MySensors. Maybe @jkandasa can help shine some light on this.

I found the problem... or to be honest @jkandasa found it. He told me in the MyController forum to check my receiving code and not use getInt() but getLong(). Thanks again to him.

thanks a lot

@mfalkvidd I mean the two options #define MY_ENCRYPTION_SIMPLE_PASSWD and #define MY_RFM69_ENABLE_ENCRYPTION (with personalization before)

@Anticimex thank you for your answer. In my case I want to implement OTA with the online version with DualOptibootloader. This way, the node will be able to decrypt and store the new firmware in external flash. With the MYS Bootloader that would not be possible as far as I understood the thing...

@TRS-80 signing will also be added. But I want to be able to send messages unseen from the 'public' to my nodes... some of them are text-based and I don't want to be sniffed...