Posts made by Danielo Rodríguez

Hello.
I just discovered the awesome senserbender module. The price seem reasonable for something that small and flexible. However, when I went to checkout the price increases up to 40$ with shipping to Spain. This makes it very inconvenient for small projects that I wanted to be budget friendly, specially because my skills will not allow me to build something very impressive.
So what I want to get is some advise about where to buy it with a reasonable shipping to Spain. I am not able to solder smd yet, so it must be assembled.

Thanks!

Can you provide more details on wiring and more close ups of the circuit and the sensor itself?
Thanks

Hello.
I want to build a battery powered presence sensor. It should have a PIR sensor (not sure if mandatory or just recommended) and a distance sensor (that I have a bunch of). It is exactly like this project:
https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/3629/robotic-lawn-mower-supervisor?_=1634468560128

However that project doesn't have much details and I am a noob (and I always be because I have no time with all my other hobbies).
Ideally I want to use the same noob board for some other sensors too because I think buyin 10 or 20 is the most budget friendly solution. Being as small as possible is a nice have but I'm willing to sacrifice it a bit for convenience. Also the more budget friendly the better

Which noob PCB is more recommended for my situation? I'll buy them through openhardware to support this awesome project.

My new gateway with leds for state and the only node I have: A wireless arcade button controller

Wow, that is very nice @mfalkvidd
So I can override the indication function and it will be called on the same events that are now handled automatically right? So if I define this function I have to handle all the enum options right?
Thanks

@BearWithBeard thanks for your response.
Yesterday it was way less common to see this blinking, probably due to my networking problems and probably longer disconnected periods.

It is not annoying me at all, it is just that I didn't expected the RX and TX leds to blink with communication that is not about the radio and the nodes, but it probably makes sense.

Thanks

Hello,
Recently I updated my gateway to add 3 status leds to it. They are working great and they allowed me to notice a singular pattern. Yesterday was the first day with the three leds and my hassio wasn't working very well. From time to time, I was seeing the green led turning on. Normal, it is looking for devices, I told myself. But today that I restarted my hassio after fixing some networking problems, I am noticing a much more frequent led blinking and not only the send one, but also the receiving one. This is what I see on the logs:

2020-07-29 09:57:15 DEBUG (MainThread) [mysensors] Sending 0;255;3;0;2;
2020-07-29 09:57:15 DEBUG (MainThread) [mysensors] Receiving 0;255;3;0;2;2.3.1
2020-07-29 09:57:25 DEBUG (MainThread) [mysensors] Sending 0;255;3;0;2;
2020-07-29 09:57:25 DEBUG (MainThread) [mysensors] Receiving 0;255;3;0;2;2.3.1
2020-07-29 09:57:35 DEBUG (MainThread) [mysensors] Sending 0;255;3;0;2;
2020-07-29 09:57:35 DEBUG (MainThread) [mysensors] Receiving 0;255;3;0;2;2.3.1

I only have two nodes, and the other node is battery powered and turned off, so, who is my gateway talking to? Is it sending packets to itself?

@monte Where do you buy that e-ink displays? they look awesome

@tbowmo said in What did you build today (Pictures) ?:

atmega32u4

Next step: build an entire keyboard and flash QMK to it!
Nice project, I thought about something similar but to operate a fan, which is way harder than communicating with a computer, I should have started with that.
Very little nice sensor that one...

I also want to highlight one problem of the arduino IDE, and that is that it is very local to your machine. It makes hard to share your projects with others or even to migrate to a different machine of yours. This may not be a problem for casual editions, but as soon as you have build 5 or 10 things this starts to be a concern. People should be able to store their projects whenever they want and not be tied to specific paths/configs on a particular machine.

At the end I was able to use D0,D1 and D4 for status leds. Something interesting is that I can use the actual DN nomenclature because there is a header file that maps them properly. The weird thing is that such file is arduino.h (I'm using platformio) so I'm not sure if it is specific for the D1 mini or if D1 is compatible with arduino pinout.
I used a 220 ohm resistor and, dam it, the leds are bright as hell, haha.
Everything is working now, it's very pleasant to see the leds blink when I turn on other node. Thanks to all the people on this forum for the great support.

@BearWithBeard Thank you very much!
I'll do that

Wow, thank you everyone! I have all the leds sink to 5v (long leg) and I was going to put a resistor on the other leg to connect them to the gpio because that is what it says on the docs, but docs are for arduino. I'm very happy that it's the same for the D1 mini. When I define the pins on the sketch should I use the same label (without the D) or should I use a different value?

By the way, what can be the i2c used on the gateway?
OH, and which resistor should I use? Does it need to be of an specific value or is it enough if it is within certain range?

Hello,
Sorry if this has been answered before, but I could not find any answer to this particular thing.
I have a wifi gateway built using a d1 mini. It is working great, but I want to have some feedback about what is going on, so I decided to add some status leds. I already wired all the leds to 5v, and when I was about to check wich other pins to use I realized that the information is for an arduino gateway, so, what are the pins that ai can use on the D1 mini for this?

I was just curious if this would have better performance in terms of battery saving.
I saw some circuits doing this with button presses and mossfets.
I suppose that, for most PIR applications the delay defeats the purpose.
Thanks for all your answers!

Thanks for your answer. Is the boot up time the only limitation? There are situations where it matters, but some others don't.

Here is a review of this
https://youtu.be/55tgEMTumGo
Not sure why, it YouTube has started suggesting this kind of videos after I read this post

@trs-80 isn't there an arduino nano rf already? I saw some of those on aliexpress

Hello.
Most PIR sensors provide 5 volts on their outout pin when they detect motion. I was guessing if I can use that pin to power an arduino or any other micro controller and have an auto power on/off mechanism that way.
I can't find any example doing that, so I guess there must be something wrong on that idea. Why?

Regards

@yveaux thanks for that piece of information!!
This was driving me crazy. I know this is an old thread, but this is still a problem today.
I think this should be added to the documentation and probably add one example with this setup properly working.

@yveaux said in Node not working after adding some wires and a capacitor:

@danielo-rodríguez said in Node not working after adding some wires and a capacitor:

I never got it working using automatic IDs and I can't understand why.

You need a controller (next to the regular gateway) to hand out the IDs. Do you have one?

Oh, that is completely new information for me. Yes, I have one, but I don't have it setup. I think the IDs was something particular to mySensors. Will this work with home assistant?

As a side note, nrf24 channel 80 maps to 2.480ghz, which is pretty close to wifi channel 11. Depending on your wifi access point settings, these may interfere.

Wow, that makes me look like a fool
I'll try to change to another channel then. Which would be a good fit? is there a range that is better to keep, like 3-2 channels or being just one channel away will be enough?

@kimot said in Node not working after adding some wires and a capacitor:

Your NRF is 2.4GHz. Your Wemos and home WiFi network is 2.4GHz too.
Maybe your WiFi router randomly switch wifi channels to the chanel of your NRF network.
Try set fixed channel on your router.

That is a good and smart advice, however:

• My router is already set to fixed channel 11
• My router is on my bottom floor while I'm doing my tests on my first floor. Maybe the interferences are not that bad? Probably I just said a stupid thing
• I have the following on my nodes and gateway: #define MY_RF24_CHANNEL 80 and since 80 is not even an available channel on wifi (not at least on my router) it should be fine even if it were not fixed

But I appreciate that you pointed it out.

Now I have good news that doesn't feel good. I did what @mfalkvidd suggested and I swapped the radio on the gateway with a version without the blob on the chip. After that everything has been working flawlessly. All my test nodes work without any problem, the ones using good radios and the ones using the radio with the blob. They all work, not a single drop. Sometimes if I touch the radio with my hands, I can see a error appearing !TSF:MSG:LEN=8,EXP=7 but does't seem to affect the operative of the module.
Why does this feel bad? Because I was on a similar situation a week ago, where everything was working perfectly for an entire week and then everything started to fail so, how do I know this is not going to fail in a week? I can't

Now I have to experiment without fixed IDs. I never got it working using automatic IDs and I can't understand why. At first I thought it was because I didn't had a "join mode button", but seems that such button has a totally different usage. If somebody could explain me how that button is supposed to work and if it is required for dynamic IDs to be assigned I will be also very grateful.

Regards.

@mfalkvidd thanks again.

@mfalkvidd said in Node not working after adding some wires and a capacitor:

I see that the nrf24 on your gateway is the variant with the "blob" instead of a chip. If the radio is in a socket, try replacing it with one that has the chip.

I have several of both, I'll try to put one of the "good ones" on the gateway to see if that makes a difference.

@mfalkvidd said in Node not working after adding some wires and a capacitor:

The antenna on the gateway is pretty close to the metal in the protoboard. Some extra distance could be good, at least to check if the protoboard is messing with the signal.

The picture is taken from above, and seems the antena is quite close to the board, but in realyti it is not that bad. I'm posting here another image to show how far it is from the bottom. Also you can see that there is a capacitor attached (same values as the node)

What disturbs me the most is that it worked for an entire week, then just some nodes and now anything works. This is kinda crazy...

Thanks for your help, I'll try with your suggestion of changing the radio

This is what I did:

I'm still get the exact same errors... I'm starting to thing that it has something to do with the gateway. Maybe I can try to build another gateway using an arduino instead of an esp8266? Do you have any sketch that I can rapidly test?

And here is a picture of my gateway

@yveaux said in Node not working after adding some wires and a capacitor:

@danielo-rodríguez Supply range for nRF24 according to the datasheet is 1.9 to 3.6V, so you are in the safe range.

Thats good to know, thanks for that information.

@mfalkvidd said in Node not working after adding some wires and a capacitor:

@danielo-rodríguez with that much stuff almost touching the antenna, transmission will be very bad.

Oh, that is a good point. What I'm going to do is to take some jumpers and move them away to see if that makes a difference.
What would you say about putting the antena in the other direction (upwards). Would that be good enough?

@mfalkvidd I was to provide pictures yesterday, but my post was being moderated and I was not able to update it. Happy to provide them now:

Something important to note is that, yesterday making the tests again all other nodes were failing with the same problematic. I'm starting to think that has some randomness on the gateway involved... but then why it sometimes works for some nodes but does not work for other nodes?
I'm using a wemos D1 mini as gateway.

Hello
This was going to be a post about how one of my nodes suddenly stopped working after I modified the circuit, but I made some measurements and at least I have some guessings to confirm with you.

My circuit is composed of:

• Arduino nano clone
• NRF24L01
• A button
• double side protoboard or perf-board
• some spare wires

At first the circuit was working perfectly. It was communicating with the gateway almost instantaneously. Then I decided to wire some pins and connect them to some "spike connectors" on another part of the board and I also realized that I forgot to connect a capacitor so I connected a 16v 47uf capacitor.
After that I started to get some errors on communication. The gateway was able to see messages coming from the node, but the node was not seeing the answers back.
I made some test with similar arduinos using jumper wires and the same gateway and everything was still working.
Then I made some measurements on the failing node, and I saw that the radio was getting 3.226v
I made some more measurements on the other working arduino and the radio was getting 3.447v. So I think the problem is the voltage drop. I took the arduino apart, without any radio or anything else and it was still output 3.2 volts on the 3.3 volts output.
What can be motivating this ? I worked perfectly for an entire week, so I don't know what could be happening.

Thanks in advance.