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.

Yes on the flyback diodes.

However, the upper transistors look like they're NPN, not PNP. The lower transistor would be PNP.

Otherwise, it looks like it would work, as long as all of the transistors are sized correctly for the current on the relay coils.

But I would be really hesitant to try to control that kind of power with an arduino. What happens if your code has an error and locks up? What if you have the magnetron running but not one of the heaters? I don't have answers, as I don't understand the working of them that well, but code errors running a high voltage radiator device like that make me a bit nervous.

I like being able to turn on the microwave and then ignore it and do other things while it's running, but it would take me a lot of watching it before I would feel comfortable with something like this.

On the other side, you're only controlling 3 relays, and it's not a nuclear reactor or anything, so I'm likely being overly cautious. But I am an engineer, and worrying about "what-if" is kind of my job, so I lean that way anyway...

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.

@NeverDie My personal preference is the Tag-Connect. It costs a bit upfront to get into it, but then there's zero ongoing BOM cost per board, and the connectors are very sturdy, so I don't get bad connections, even while doing extended troubleshooting.

Of course, if I hadn't needed them for a customer project, I might never have sprung for the upfront cost, as the cables are somewhat spendy for the what they are. But they are very well made, and have been great for me. The board footprint is pretty tiny, so that has yet to have ever been an issue in my projects. The footprint is also keyed, so you can't put the cable on backwards. Always a good thing. Also, since the connection points are not through-holes, you still have the back and interior of the board for routing traces. Of course the alignment pins are still through-hole. I prefer the type without the locking pins, and then there's a little board that you slide on the alignment pins from the back to hold everything together.

If I were to go with a standard, I wouldn't be excited about his ESP Flash one, simply because I don't see a need for it. Yet another 'standard' just fragments things worse. I would use the ESP-Prog one if needed, and use the .05" pins if I needed tiny.

Probably the only problem with a too-big capacitor is how quickly it might want to charge when everything is connected. You might need to build in some kind of rate limiting for that.

I think capacitors with a blocking diode would be the right call. How long does it need to supply power to the Arduino for? And are you running anything else off of this, or only the Arduino?

Basically, knowing how much power draw (current) that you need, and how long you need it for, and then also how much of a voltage droop is acceptable will tell you how big the capacitors need to be. I'm going to use a bunch of round numbers for easy math, but hopefully you can see how to adapt for your project.

Let's say you're at 5V, and you're drawing 100mA (a lot for just an Arduino, but not so much if you're also running LEDs and a radio, or a servo, or whatever).

If the voltage droop from the batteries due to the motors spinning up lasts for 1 second, then we just need to calculate how much charge that is, and how big the capacitor needs to be to keep it within a certain range.

The total charge, in Coulombs, is 100mA x 1 second = 100mC.

The voltage on a capacitor is: V = charge (in Coulombs) / capacitance (in Farads)

So say you want the voltage drop on the capacitor to be less than 0.5V. Then that's 10% of the initial voltage, so 10x on the capacitor (1/10%) gives you the ballpark. Which means 1F capacitor should be the ballpark you need.

Of course there's simplifications here. (And it's been a while since I did this formally - hopefully I didn't make any big mistakes.) Also real capacitors will not act the same as an ideal one, and tolerances on capacitors are HUGE. Of course the real voltage drop is an exponential, and the current draw will also have part that changes with voltage, but not the same as a resistor, so it would take a bunch of math to calculate exactly.

However, if you can get a ballpark answer and then double it or so, for tolerances, you'll probably be good enough. Heck, for a hobby level project maybe simply going 10x for a few pennies more would be a good idea.

@mfalkvidd Oh, that kind of issue didn't even occur to me. I was thinking that it was still showing up as the same mysensors network, but that now what used to be sensor 10 was now 3 or whatever.

Yeah, my suggestion wouldn't help if Home Assistant sees this as a totally new connection/profile/whatever.

And I use Home Assistant, and I've changed gateways, but I'm always tinkering, so I change things often, and it was no big deal for what I do to go from one to the other. I don't remember having any issues with this. (Could be I still did, but it was a minor enough problem, compared to other big issues, that I simply forgot about it.)

But I don't have an easy way to test going from one to the other right now. I don't have a spare gateway to test on.

Try using the Neopixel library.

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide/arduino-library-use

https://sbaronda.com/2020/09/20/sk6812-with-arduino-using-neopixel-library/

Those should get you started. Basically, instead of having your code directly turn a pin on or off, you tell it to set a color in the library and then run the show() command and the library will do all the pin toggling needed to actually control the LEDs.

I don't know if there's a way to do it from the Home Assistant side, but it's always possible to hard-code the ID of each individual 'sensor' when you're programming it. If you want them to never change, this is a way, and maybe the only way to do it. (I don't really know, but it's the only way that I know of.)

According to this page: https://www.mysensors.org/download/sensor_api_20

You set MY_NODE_ID to the ID you want and you should be good.

#define MY_NODE_ID 12 // or whatever number you want...

@qqlapraline Those are some quick times for assembly! I usually am doing a board with parts they don't stock, so I have only used them for assembly a few times, and not recently, so it's good to hear.

@NeverDie I've used JLCPCB a bunch of times now, and I have yet to find an error that affected the board electrically. I've found small things like sloppy printing or some rough edges of the copper, but always small, and like I said, it has yet to cause an issue for me. For prototyping they're really hard to beat.

Yes on the flyback diodes.

However, the upper transistors look like they're NPN, not PNP. The lower transistor would be PNP.

Otherwise, it looks like it would work, as long as all of the transistors are sized correctly for the current on the relay coils.

But I would be really hesitant to try to control that kind of power with an arduino. What happens if your code has an error and locks up? What if you have the magnetron running but not one of the heaters? I don't have answers, as I don't understand the working of them that well, but code errors running a high voltage radiator device like that make me a bit nervous.

I like being able to turn on the microwave and then ignore it and do other things while it's running, but it would take me a lot of watching it before I would feel comfortable with something like this.

On the other side, you're only controlling 3 relays, and it's not a nuclear reactor or anything, so I'm likely being overly cautious. But I am an engineer, and worrying about "what-if" is kind of my job, so I lean that way anyway...

@NeverDie Yes, though sometimes you have to dig a bit on their site to find them. Here's the one for use with the 6 pin tag-connect: https://www.tag-connect.com/product/tc2030-retaining-clip-board-3-pack

They don't automatically come with the cables, which could be a pain if you didn't know to add them to the order. Though this way I guess if they wear out it's easy to just buy the one without the other...

@NeverDie My personal preference is the Tag-Connect. It costs a bit upfront to get into it, but then there's zero ongoing BOM cost per board, and the connectors are very sturdy, so I don't get bad connections, even while doing extended troubleshooting.

Of course, if I hadn't needed them for a customer project, I might never have sprung for the upfront cost, as the cables are somewhat spendy for the what they are. But they are very well made, and have been great for me. The board footprint is pretty tiny, so that has yet to have ever been an issue in my projects. The footprint is also keyed, so you can't put the cable on backwards. Always a good thing. Also, since the connection points are not through-holes, you still have the back and interior of the board for routing traces. Of course the alignment pins are still through-hole. I prefer the type without the locking pins, and then there's a little board that you slide on the alignment pins from the back to hold everything together.

If I were to go with a standard, I wouldn't be excited about his ESP Flash one, simply because I don't see a need for it. Yet another 'standard' just fragments things worse. I would use the ESP-Prog one if needed, and use the .05" pins if I needed tiny.

@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.