@mfalkvidd You are right but may be should there be for each sensor or actuator first the most basic sketch but also at the end of the page a complete version with all functionalities and granted to work by the mysensors team.
Of course for the complicated sketch version a big warning in red letters that this is not recommended for newbies would help...
Found this interesting page
http://www.home-automation-community.com/arduino-low-power-how-to-run-atmega328p-for-a-year-on-coin-cell-battery/
but the gnd pin and quiescent currents of the minipros regulator LQ33 the guy is talking about in this page (80 microA at 0.1mA load current), may be much bigger than for my minipro which regulator has LG33 written on it , so if the following is the correct datasheet:
http://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/view/308176/ELM-TECH/ELM1117LG-33-S.html
it has a typical 5mA quiescent current. This is much much higher than the previous (LQ33) one but the load current is also not specified so i'm not sure...
All in all do the analysis of the above page apply to the 3.3 minipro which i bought through the store on your site ?
It says that "Even though the standard voltage regulator is not efficient at low current, it is still good enough to run the 3.3 V Pro Mini on 3 AA Alkaline batteries for more than one year, based on the measured power consumption of 54 μA in power-down sleep and 3.90 mA in active mode."
Thank you in advance, it's the first time in my life i try to understand a datasheet...
@gohan
That's what i'm trying to understand ... also MQTT gateway needs ethernet, and there is no such thing available for a gps tracker which can only communicate through gsm, and once the data are received through the gsm network , one would just like to be able to collect them and translate to a location on a map or to get them in a controller where it can be used with other sensor data to trigger scripts ... for all this i was wondering why the simplest solution would not be the better : (mfalkvidd seems to agree) just a sketch to collect gps data and send them as sms and nothing else ... However part of the mysensors protocol devoted to presentation of child objects and so on would make sense if the final receiver, for instance domoticZ could recognize it even though it was received through SMS ...(i don't have the impression that this is possible so far? i don't even know wether domoticZ can recognize and handle sensors and actuators through SMS. yet that would be cool all the more since we have this smsgateway sketch which could evolve to become a genuine SMSgateway or even WAN gateway if it could talk to a controller through the exchange of SMS or Lora messages and to other sensors with the wireless short distance mysensors protocol )
LoraWan will be the next step. Actually i dont have a specific project, i'm just exploring as much as i can all IoT possibilities as a teacher in networks and telecoms... Many thanks for all the valuable info i got from mysensors forum
@Rene046
not
msgbatt.set(batteryPcnt ,1);
but
send(msgbatt.set(batteryPcnt ,1));
also may be better to use S_MULTIMETER and V_VOLTAGE (rather than S_INFO and V_TEXT) as adviced by AWI and also 2 decimals hence
send(msgbatt.set(batteryPcnt ,2));
I have a similar question : "Mysensors vs Bluetooth BLE".
More specifically, what was the point to develop the mysensor protocol when BLE is available with very low cost modules (which is not the case for zigbee in general much more expansive) ?
Is it that BLE is constrained to remain on 2.4 GHz when mysensors protocol can run on many frequencies kind of transmitters ?
Is it that mysensors can be even cheeper ?
As far as i have understood a similiratity is that both are not IP based nor mesh protocols.
....
BLE is a much more complex protocol up to the application layer however the success of mysensors in the DiY community seems to imply that much of the extra offered capabilities by BLE (security?, complete endpoint identification to the network?, network management capabilities? ) are of little value for most domotics applications ...(?)
Or may be it's just that BLE is not designed to allow the BLE nodes to declare themselves to controllers such as domoticZ , ...
@gohan the last pulse count seems to be requested from the gateway ... does the gateway automatically reflects all user variables defined in the controller so that other nodes can access them by requesting from the gateway?
I did not find any info about how i could use reception of the heartbit signal in domoticz to build a AWAKE/SLEEPING variable...and smartsleep is also not supported by DZ.
SO i'm trying the other way which is to have a sensor that would indicate to the controller when the node is awake so that the controller could use such device variable in a script and react to this in order to send various switches commands which were kept in the state of a dummy switch just waiting for the node to wake up.
To have such a DiY awake/sleep sensor detector i was thinking that i could use one pin of the node reflecting the state of the node (for instance HIGH when the node is awake and LOW when the node is sleeping: i can do that in nodemanager with nodeManager.setAutoPowerPins(true) for the pin i want ) and use this as an interrupt toward another pin of the node defined as the input pin of a sensor switch (as in a motion detector) ... : so waking up of the node would interrupt itself and the controller would be notified
i managed to make this work (in node manager) but sometimes it is unstable and i also realized by chance that such sensor switch could trigger when the nodes wake up even if it is left open (not connected to any other pin).
But unsurprisingly i also encountered some apparantly instable behaviours (glitches) from time to time... so i'm wondering what much more simple solution did i miss..
any comment or suggestion welcome!
i also just realized that there is a special AREF pin intended for what i was thinking about ... but it's not available on the mini pro.
My measurements using Vcc as Ref have been indeed very fluctuating, however what i get was highly sufficient to monitor the battery feeding a 3.3v step up regulator to the arduino and help anticipate failure
wow! fantastic! ... the github link readme warns that it's not yet fully ready but the interface is already impressive!
I still have the same question i had for nodemanager though : for measuring another battery than the one that feeds Vcc obviously another pin is needed, however why not propose as well the option of measuring such pin voltage but with Vcc as the reference rather than the internal 1.1V which most of the time makes necessary a voltage divider ? Actually i did the modification in nodemanager.cpp to use DEFAULT (~3.3V) rather than INTERNAL (1.1V) reference for a 3.3 pro mini and i can get the expected battery level without any voltage divider.
Another unrelated question i have is : could there be any way to adapt the idea of the readVcc method (which is to measure the internal 1.1V against the Vcc reference to get Vcc) but using any voltage applied to a pin as the reference to again measure the internal 1.1 against it ? This would allow the masurement of any voltage greater than 1.1 without voltage divider while the usual method would be applied for measuring any voltage lower than 1.1 ... what did i miss that makes this impossible ?
After testing some functionalities of nodemanager, i was wondering if already somebody was working on making a GUI for nodemanager which would allow to build one's sketch completely from a graphical interface (at least the most common and basic functionalities) : i thing the great work that resulted in Nodemanager has so well structured the various functions needed that it has already paved the way for creating such a graphical interface.
@mfalkvidd You are right but may be should there be for each sensor or actuator first the most basic sketch but also at the end of the page a complete version with all functionalities and granted to work by the mysensors team.
Of course for the complicated sketch version a big warning in red letters that this is not recommended for newbies would help...
Hi,
i'm currently testing the functionalities of node manager as for battery monitoring.
As i understand it your
void setBatteryInternalVcc(bool value) in case bool =true is only to measure the Vcc the arduino is powered through.
To measure another voltage , for instance the input voltage Vbatt of a step up regulator that feeds the arduino, Vbatt then being the actual battery voltage, we have no option except using bool = false and use a voltage divider to measure Vbatt on a chosen arduino pin with 1.1V as the reference.
... or what did i miss because your default value for voltperbits which is ~ 3.3 /1024 seems to imply that the reference is 3.3V in which case a voltage divider is not needed...
what is your actual reference when measuring voltages? is it actually not defined and needing to be defined by using void setReference(int value) ? ... a bit misleading because in your documentation this void is not refered to in your battery management section