Just a warning upfront - I'm an engineer, but not an RF engineer, so I do see some things, but I'm almost guaranteed to miss others.

As far as your highlighted line, it is a trace, but not a via. A via connects the trace on one plane of copper with a trace on another plane.

That trace should really be as short and direct as possible. Wrapping around the back of the module and along other signal lines is not a good idea. I see that the closest line to it is 3.3V power, so that acts basically as ground for small signal, but any power spike is bound to couple into the antenna line as well, at least some. If possible, it would be best to have ground on both sides of the antenna trace on that side of the board, as well as the whole surface on the other side of the board from it. Might also want to guard it by having vias connect the ground planes on either side of it to make kind of a 3d cage around it.

Additionally, you should try for 50 ohm trace impedance on the antenna line. However, there is no one-size-fits-all answer for the width of this line. It depends on the exact board parameters, and even to a small amount on the frequency of the signal. There are trace width impedance calculators that you can use to get this answer. https://resources.pcb.cadence.com/blog/2019-just-how-wide-should-a-pcb-50-ohm-trace-width-be

Almost guaranteed that it's correct to ground those 4 outer pins of the antenna connector. View the datasheet of the specific connector you are using to be 100% sure.

I have a Nortek GoControl USBZB-1 zwave/zigbee hub. I've been very happy with it. I've mostly used cheap devices with it, and only maybe 2 more mainstream things, like a Philips light. Other than lights, I think I only have a bunch of these plugs around: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08L3K5KPB

Anything branded Zigbee is supposed to be certified to work with any Zigbee network, but I have no idea what the big names do on top of the protocol. I've also never used a name-brand bridge device, so I've never really looked into what it might need. Home Assistant knows that it's a Philips light connected to it, but that's because it asks the devices for their info, and things like brand and serial id get returned to it. Probably other stuff - it's been a while since I looked. Anyway, even though it knows all that about the light, it's just using the basic Zigbee driver for it through the USBZB-1 gateway, and it has full control and it all works fine. I'm pretty sure it's not sending out custom Philips commands to the light, but just standard stuff.

Hope that helped a little!

@NeverDie Yeah, but when I priced out domestic places, they all wanted enough that the client just decided to go a different way. This was only going to be for a prototype, but even so, I got prices ranging from I think $10-50 per pin holder, and it was less than 2 grams of plastic each. I just checked again, and JLCPCB would do them for $1 each, and then $20 for quick shipping, and as low as $4 for the slow boat that takes a month. None of those options were very appealing at the time.

Digikey wants $13.66 each for this when I pick qty 10, so still not worth it for this project. Shipping with them is free, but I have no idea how quick they would be.

I also checked PCBWay, just for fun, and they quoted 1.24 at qty 10, for $12.45 total. Interestingly, the quote for 1 was $12.45 also. They wouldn't show an estimate for shipping without clicking the 'Submit' button and having a human engineer review the file for printability. Since I'm not actually going to do this now, I don't want to waste their time, so I don't have a total price from them for comparison.

As far as OP, this is a very old thread from 3.5 years ago, so I doubt that they still need help.

I think your numbers look good. Nice job getting the trace much shorter - that should help a bunch.

@NeverDie said in Which vector network analyzer should we buy?:

It said version 2 was due in January.

It looks to me like it's available now. After where it mentions the 2.0, there's a link where it says 'authorized dealer.'

That link goes here: https://www.tindie.com/products/hcxqsgroup/nanovna-v2/

And it says you can buy it now for a little under $60 US.

I don't know anything else about it, but I'm also considering getting one, now that I've read about it in this thread. I like the idea.

I wouldn't even bother with an Arduino/microcontroller at all for this. Just some diodes on each circuit and maybe some transistors for powering the large LED strips, or could also use tiny relays.

But I don't see where it has anything nearly complicated enough to have code running on a chip to run anything on it. @itjobhunter if this is not helpful and you need more specific details and/or a quick napkin sketch I can throw something together to show what I'm trying to say.

At least here where I am - West coast of US - they're allowed +/- 10% and still be counted as within spec. So those numbers are fine.

The thing is, they have voltage transformers with multiple contacts inside, and they will step the voltage up or down on the neighborhood feeders as necessary to account for varying voltages on the higher voltage lines. Actually, I think the switching happens going from high to medium voltage, and there aren't really that many of the switching transformers in the system. All of your local transformers for the houses wouldn't have them - that would be far too spendy. They do it on a large scale.

But as the residential power demands change over the day, they use the switchers to keep everything balanced. They could keep the voltage variance smaller, but at the cost of more frequent switching, and every switch of the contacts creates some wear, so more maintenance eventually. Every switch also creates some ripples in the rest of the system, I'm pretty sure. But those are probably pretty minor - it's a very stiff system. Also having higher resolution on the switchers would be more complicated and have more parts/windings inside every one of them. They keep the frequency very tightly regulated, but allow the voltage to float a bit. The frequency variances they have to make up for throughout the day so that over the course of a whole day there's practically no net change at all. (For the sake of clocks that literally count cycles and therefore don't need a crystal.)

Actually, allowing the voltage to vary also has another nice benefit to the system - it allows for a natural damping of disturbances. When the voltage dips a bit because of increased demand, the power used by many resistive appliances will also dip, so that can help the system in recovering as potentially more generation is brought online. I don't think something like AC that has a spinning motor helps much, as the frequency won't vary much.

Sorry if you're aware of most of this. I worked for the power company for a while, though that has been some years ago now.

@kasparsd Yes, this is a very disheartening thing to see.

I would rather not have to maintain a local version with some of the fixes that I see talked about on the forums, but since there's no movement on the code, at least from looking at github, I'm left with doing a bunch of it myself if I want to incorporate the changes.

Especially bad when the changes are in a pull request and just languishing there. It's discouraging when I want to go work on something but I need to deal with the core mysensors code before I can even get to that step.

I mean, I'll deal with it cause I still appreciate mysensors and find it a net benefit, but I can certainly understand why some people either give up on it or maybe never pick it up in the first place, seeing stuff like that.

@gulsimsur Why are there links to surveyzop in your reply?

I know this an old topic now, and I don't know if this would still help you @otousset, but I ended up running across this while searching for a solution, as I had the same problem. I finally found the solution at this page: https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/platforms/ststm32.html

What it comes down to is that there are two different 'Arduino' cores with platformio, and we have to use the 'maple' one, which has the libraries in the format that the MySensors expects to see. The line:
board_build.core = maple
has to be added to the platformio.ini file in the project folder, which switches the core to be what MySensors framework needs. Then I got it to compile without complaint. (Well, but I guess I haven't actually finished my installation to be sure that it works with the gateway...)

@Larson Yeah, I think of "No Clean" as really being "easier to clean." There's still some residue with those that I have tried, but they really are easier to clean up after than the regular flux.

So I still prefer them, but I don't like to leave them uncleaned. Maybe the residue isn't corrosive like regular flux? At any rate I don't trust it either.

@NeverDie You've already tried the tricks I usually resort to. Maybe try to get a hold of an administrator over there? It sure seems like that site should accept all KiCad files, since that's kind of the whole point.

@Larson While I definitely agree about the importance of using plenty of flux - it's almost magic - another very important tool is to have plenty of desoldering braid around. It's super cheap, and along with plenty of flux it makes it easy to clean up excess solder on the board or bridging between two pins, or whatever.

That combination will let you solder all kinds of things that otherwise look very daunting.

@NeverDie They claim that it is already available in a QFN16 package. https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/sse/ic-design/rf-ic/wakeup.html

But they say you have to go through "EBV Chips" to get it, and everything I've seen makes it look like that's for large companies only. I can get to this page at Avnet, https://www.avnet.com/wps/portal/ebv/solutions/ebvchips/ebvchips-overview/ but I can't seem to get past it to any chance to order or see a detailed datasheet or anything like that. A search just on regular Avnet for the part turns up empty with the things I can think of.

This is the best page I can come up with: https://www.avnet.com/wps/portal/ebv/solutions/ebvchips/rficient/ which is cool and all, but still nothing orderable for normal people.

@NeverDie Yeah, but when I priced out domestic places, they all wanted enough that the client just decided to go a different way. This was only going to be for a prototype, but even so, I got prices ranging from I think $10-50 per pin holder, and it was less than 2 grams of plastic each. I just checked again, and JLCPCB would do them for $1 each, and then $20 for quick shipping, and as low as $4 for the slow boat that takes a month. None of those options were very appealing at the time.

Digikey wants $13.66 each for this when I pick qty 10, so still not worth it for this project. Shipping with them is free, but I have no idea how quick they would be.

I also checked PCBWay, just for fun, and they quoted 1.24 at qty 10, for $12.45 total. Interestingly, the quote for 1 was $12.45 also. They wouldn't show an estimate for shipping without clicking the 'Submit' button and having a human engineer review the file for printability. Since I'm not actually going to do this now, I don't want to waste their time, so I don't have a total price from them for comparison.

As far as OP, this is a very old thread from 3.5 years ago, so I doubt that they still need help.

@NeverDie Oh, sorry, I wasn't trying to get proof or anything.

I just was asking for your personal experience. Not doubting, just looking at them now and wondering how it had been for you. Do you mind saying which one you have that you are so happy with? I've been looking at different 'best' lists, and getting some conflicting info on them.

I'd just like a little more input before buying one, but with seeing all the improvements, and how many devices we have that could use it, now I'm wanting to do it sooner rather than later.

Thanks!

@NeverDie I think that usually you can 'rescue' the symbols and part footprints from the files directly as well. I've had it successfully work usually, but a couple times when opening an old file from a previous KiCad version I've had some errors.

Knock on wood, but so far nothing has been unrecoverable. Of course having a dedicated symbol and footprint library would make it even more foolproof, but it might not be necessary.

@NeverDie I'll have to do that next time I upgrade the wifi point. Now based on our chat I've started to look into them, and this might push me into doing an upgrade fairly soon. I see that quite a few of our end devices actually already support it, so I would be well served to swap the router over, too. I guess I had really lost track of the state of the art and thought most of our devices were in sync...

What do you mean by better performance? Is that better bandwidth, or longer range, or something else?

Thanks for the feedback on it! I really appreciate a first hand account!

@NeverDie I would sure hope it would be faster, otherwise no point in doing it. You can change the circuit so that the ESP8266 doesn't even have power unless it gets an external trigger. From the video this needs some kind of external trigger either way.

I would have to test it to be sure, but it sounds like it's booting fresh each time, so I don't see how it could be faster.

@NeverDie I tried to combine shipping and try out their 3d service a few weeks ago, and they said something like 'incompatible' when trying to combine the shipping. They would only ship the 3d print separately from the boards. And I was only trying to print some little pin holders, so it wasn't like it was something large and unwieldy, or even really delicate. Just a basic small part.

So anyway, don't count on being able to combine shipping. I ended up not having them do it, so I don't know how their 3d print quality is. I might still end up trying it just to see, but I have my own printer, so it's not a rush.