@alexsh1 the reason i am using the 18650's is the fact i have a steady stream of them coming in for my large battery packs. I have a couple hundred that aren't dead but just aren't quite up to to the standard i am putting in my big packs.

@rozpruwacz gonna have to check in to this. i have lots of 3.3 but no 3.0 ldo's

I have a the fantastic newbie pcb board from @sundberg84 and I am making a small pool temp sensor with it.

I am running in to some issues though and wondering if anyone has some ideas. So a fully charged 18650 can get up to 4.2v so I need to regulate it. I was looking to put the battery in through the RAW pin that way the VCC would be 3.3v. However, that is only good until the battery drops below 3.3. The 18650's I am using can go to 3.0 pretty easily, datasheet even says 2.8. 3 is kind of where I would like to limit it though. So I have a little 3.3v boost converter. But when it's over 3.3v not sure if it's going to damage the boost converter (guessing yes).

So i am curious if it's possible to be able to use the newbie board, have the battery voltage monitored. Handle a fully charged 18650 and be able to use the boost converter if the battery drops below 3.3v.

Thanks!

@thucar thanks ill check it out

Hey everyone! A buddy of mine is venturing in to a little farming on some unused land at his parents exotic fish farm... yes for real. lol.

He wants to automate a bit of, mainly monitoring the moisture level and open a solenoid valve to water it. The base station will be at the edge of the property. I got some info today from him, said the furthest distance between sensor and base station is going to be maybe 60 yards. Im guessing mesh probably won't be needed in this scenario, so no repeaters.

I think openhab would be WAY overkill for what he is wanting to do here with literally just a couple of actuators and a couple sensors. He does want to be able to see graphs over time of stuff. I like like the idea of using mysensors for this just so we don't have to reinvent the wheel.

The gateway would be on a raspberry pi since that's where his software would most likely run too.

Now that I have provided some info. Anyone have any suggestions on maybe a piece of software for this? any suggestions? clarifications?

Thanks!

Woah. very cool. going to look in to those some more.

I agree, I am wondering if just doing a small pcb, oled screen and some smd parts would be easier.

I don't want to wear extra stuff either. Definitely got me thinking though.

So, I have looked in to this. I even had a fitbit that i was hoping to use to determine if I fell asleep at night and turn off lights in my home automation system.

The down side I ran into is this. I had fitbit setup with ifttt since that was something it could interface with. The sleep detection worked. HOWEVER. It only actually posted info to IFTTT when you woke up, at that point, all sleep related data was submitted. So it didn't track it real time.

I have been looking in to how to integrate sleep in to my HA but also like you mentioned quality of sleep. The fitbit utilizes motion to determine "restless" sleep. Attaching a bunch of sensors to myself doesn't seem like it would yield comfortable natural sleep. So potentially stuff like a mesh of piezo sensors under a mattress topper would work. that would detect when the values change indicating turning, movement.

Temperature should be easy (fitbit probably does it, i had a cheap one so it did not).

If you want to get crazy (which if i had time i would go this route) you can get a fitness watch with a certain chip in it, and reprogram it.

Arduino nrf51822 Smart watch, fitness tracker – 36:39
— Roger Clark

That's what he did. This could be REALLY REALLY cool. You could code in your own parameters and what not, since it's bluetooth LE you could track it via phone or just remote sensors.

Once you have some basic "restless" night tracking you could do some experimenting (even with the fitbit).

• track your sleep for a week or 2 to get a baseline of how much time each night you sleep "restless"
• change thermostat temp up/down - track again and compare.
• monitor body temp and see if warmer/colder = restless. find sweet spot.
• integrate body temp monitor to HA system to control thermostat to keep you correct temp

If you make any progress, definitely let me know, i would be interested to see what you come up with!

I would be really interested to see this put in practice. For stuff like those sensors I can't imagine a little extra latency being a terrible thing.

Kind of makes me want to make a bunch of battery/solar nodes and just hide them places and see how far you can get a network to go

Does adding ack to messages help trigger any failures if something can't deliver? ... well that didn't make much sense.

So lets say i have 2 repeaters on my network. i have a sensor that wakes up to report info. it normally goes to repeater1 -> gateway but repeater1 is acting up. Could you tell it to wait for an ack? after X amount of time with no ack would it trigger to find a new parent?