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.

@Vuinne-Ryvmar You seem to be confused about what this forum is. Maybe you just ended up here on a random Google search?

But in our case on an Arduino, D3 is literally the name for one of the metal legs coming off of the little controller, and we call it a pin sometimes. @tbowmo was looking for how to send the command to turn the power on or off to that part of the board, not a code to enable connecting up a controller to their phone.

I see that a D3 game controller is a thing, but I doubt you will have any luck getting help with that here. It's not what this site is about.

This is what we work with:

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 As far as when the shortage ends, ??? I've seen estimates different times that it's "right around the corner" but nothing that was very convincing to me. Intel just this week or last came out and said that they think it's going to be better soon. NVidia chips/cards are getting to be more available. And random different chips have re-appeared, so maybe they're right this time? I wouldn't bet on it, though. There are still tons of parts that are hard or impossible to get in any quantity. I'm no insider, though. I shop at Digikey, Mouser, etc. same as you. Just maybe more often and a bit higher qty sometimes.

I actually have some of the Attiny3226 here to play with. When they came into stock, I bought a small bag of them. I haven't yet had a chance to do anything with them, though. I do see power consumption tables. pg 477-478 of the datasheet. https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/268/ATtiny3224_3226_3227_Data_Sheet_DS40002345B-2887812.pdf Numbers seem pretty reasonable, for a claimed 'low power' family of chips.

@NeverDie I've only done my own panelization maybe 2 or 3 times ever. Usually just leave it to the board house, but 10 or so years ago, before the board houses were quite this cheap and I was on more of a budget because of saving for a down payment, I did try it out for some personal projects as an experiment.

But I didn't even try to do v-grooves. Not sure if whichever one I was using would even allow it. I just left extra room between the active parts of the board on the PCB and literally took tin snips and cut them apart with that. With 1 cm between boards it's easy to not hit anything.

Obviously doing it like that wouldn't weaken their board, but if you need precise board shape/size then this wouldn't do it. Ever since then the prices have gotten so low that I don't bother trying. I would be interested knowing what about JLCPCB's process makes them want to limit any order to the 30 pieces. That's always seemed a bit weird to me. I would think they would welcome the extra volume/money.

But weirdly enough, I don't even know where to go for larger orders. I mean, I can do a search like anyone else, but I don't have direct experience. By the time it gets to that qty, then the assembly house deals directly with whoever they work with to get the boards made. At that point it's not me dealing with them directly, except for passing requirements to the client, who then passes them to the assembly house, etc.

I've also entered some of their limitations into KiCad, but I'm not sure if I did a complete job of it. I try to be a bit more conservative than being right at the manufacturable edge. But yeah, get the rules to catch as much as possible. I think my problems came in when I did something that such a minor change I didn't even really think about running the rules again, and of course something like that is usually harmless, but every once in a while it does something unexpected, so obviously the rules need to be checked after every change, and every time before exporting gerbers for manufacturing. And I try to do that, but still these days I'm sure that are times that I forget.

@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.

@OldSurferDude It looks like your gateway is set to send to the wrong topic? In the debug log it looks like the gateway is sending to the 'out' topic, while you mentioned that that was output from mysensors. But in your text you said you had it set the other way, so ??

I don't have a system set up with MQTT now. I used it for a while, but got tired of having to remember to update the RPi that was doing the gateway work. I kept letting it get way out of date and that's a bit of a security issue. So I switched to a serial port connection that's powered by the HA server and plugged into a USB port from it.

But have you used the log parser? https://www.mysensors.org/build/parser

It can help a ton with understanding all the messages that you're getting.

But double check your topic settings is the only idea I have right now after seeing those log messages. It looks like the gateway sent to the 'out' topic, rather than just listening to it.

Yes, that does look nice, and I'm going to have to think about doing something similar. Water leak can really ruin your day!

However, how can you just casually mention "home made smart speakers" without giving more detail??? That's what I want to hear about! :)

I was about ready to make a bunch of them using snips.ai and was even starting on 3d printing enclosures when they announced that it was being taken over and was no longer available. :(

I still plan to do it, but I haven't been able to make the time yet, and I haven't settled on which setup to use instead of snips. Though most likely is Project Alice, which is kind of/sort of an open source fork of snips. (With a lot less polish. We'll see how it goes.)

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...)

@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. :(

I'm an engineer, though not RF. My understanding, from short discussions years ago with RF engineers, was that the ground planes have strong effects on antenna performance.

Depending on the design of the antenna, sometimes you want the ground plane and sometimes you don't.

But that's the extent of what I remember. (And it could be that I've even got errors in that little bit.) But basically to go with whatever the antenna designer recommended, because there are reasons for it. Just because one design calls for it and the other doesn't, it doesn't make either of them wrong.

Without the deep understanding myself, and not having however much testing equipment necessary to check the results, I try to stick as close to what the manufacturer/designer calls for as possible.

@CrankyCoder Rhasspy is a good one to add to my list!

I've seen the name before, but I suspect I thought it was tied to something else? For some reason I've never looked deeper into it. That was a silly oversight on my part. Thanks for the clue!

Would you mind adding your experiences to the Smart Speaker topic that I started? It would be great to hear from another user direct feedback on what that system is like! (And I would like to keep from driving this topic too much off into the weeds. :) )

Sorry about all the replies, but I just remembered one more thing. I was using the current version of MySensors, but I also then switched to the development branch, just to see if it changed anything, but that also didn't do any good. (Didn't do any harm, either.)