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    Frederic Schaer

    @Frederic Schaer

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    Best posts made by Frederic Schaer

    • Found my cause of gateway <-> RF24 connection issues (sign fail / NACK issues)

      Hi,

      Just connecting to report something I found yesterday. I did not find this in the troubleshooting guide here :
      https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/666/read-this-first-it-could-save-you-a-lot-of-time

      My issue was the following :

      • everything working correctly on my desk
      • but getting lots of "holes" in received data from my temp sensor if I placed it in my garage about 5 meters away from the Raspberry RF24 gateway.
      • After plugging my nano+rf24 on a laptop to see the serial output, I saw tons of "SIGN FAIL" and "NACK" issues.

      Typical errors were like this :

      !TSF:MSG:SEND,0-0-1-1,s=255,c=3,t=16,pt=0,l=0,sg=0,ft=0,st=NACK:
      !SGN:SGN:NCE REQ,TO=1 FAIL
      !TSF:MSG:SIGN FAIL
      

      At first, I thought this was because I placed the sensor in with my DSL box, in a small 10' rack enclosure : this is is a metal box, I thought this could act as a Faraday bog cage... but no. Since I fixed the issue, the sensor is back there.

      The real cause was the wifi (mine ?) : my GW is placed next to a tp-link wifi access point, which was configured for choosing the best channel...
      So what must have happened is that when some neighboors started to heavily use their 2.4GHz wifi (spanning over channels 7 THROUGH 13 and probably even 14), I started getting holes. Either because of the neigbour, or because my AP was switching to a channel interfering with the mysensor RF24 configured channel.

      Surprisingly, setting mysensors RF24 channel to 100, or even 123... did not help at all even if as I understand it, these should be outside of the wifi channels used in France (??)

      How I fixed this :

      • used a "wifi analyser app" to choose wisely
      • configured my AP to use a fixed 2.4GHz channel (I'm trying to only use 5GHz anyways)(I chose wifi channel 4)
      • configured mysensors to use RF24 channel #1 (#define MY_RF24_CHANNEL 1)

      Since then, I got absolutely no hole in my data !

      Last thought : how is it possible that a consumer wifi AP (my neighbor's "FREEwifi" DSL box) is spanning over more than half the 2.4GHz spectrum ? isn't that extremely selfish ??

      posted in Troubleshooting
      Frederic Schaer
      Frederic Schaer
    • Biulding my 1st PCB for an arduino nano + mysensors... anyone ?

      Hi

      I just started playing with kicad... beware, noob ahead 😉

      So, I'm trying to design a PCB for an arduino nano + Mysensors, battery powered.
      I've read stuff here and there, and tried to include a way to measure battery, I included an DS18b20 onboard and a +5V battery booster to power the board with 2xAA batteries...

      I'd like to know if someone could check what I've done and could tell me if what I've done looks ok or teribly wrong... before I go ahead and start ordering 10 pieces just to find out the stuff doesn't work 😉

      I tried to mimic the easy newby Mysensors PCB board which is both meant for arduino pro mini and with an old kikad + libraries which I was unable to find... (yes, I've since found that pro minis should consume less power, I'll order some when I'm finished playing with my nanos 😉 )

      So here is my schema :
      0_1541966084467_schema.png

      And the PCB layout which, according to the debugger, is "ok"...
      0_1541966463226_pcb.png

      I can add other files if requested, or even all the kikad (v5) files if needed, I'm just unsure I should attach these as is like the images here, or as a zip, or ?

      Many thanks to anyone taking the time to read this :]
      Best regards

      posted in Hardware
      Frederic Schaer
      Frederic Schaer

    Latest posts made by Frederic Schaer

    • Found my cause of gateway <-> RF24 connection issues (sign fail / NACK issues)

      Hi,

      Just connecting to report something I found yesterday. I did not find this in the troubleshooting guide here :
      https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/666/read-this-first-it-could-save-you-a-lot-of-time

      My issue was the following :

      • everything working correctly on my desk
      • but getting lots of "holes" in received data from my temp sensor if I placed it in my garage about 5 meters away from the Raspberry RF24 gateway.
      • After plugging my nano+rf24 on a laptop to see the serial output, I saw tons of "SIGN FAIL" and "NACK" issues.

      Typical errors were like this :

      !TSF:MSG:SEND,0-0-1-1,s=255,c=3,t=16,pt=0,l=0,sg=0,ft=0,st=NACK:
      !SGN:SGN:NCE REQ,TO=1 FAIL
      !TSF:MSG:SIGN FAIL
      

      At first, I thought this was because I placed the sensor in with my DSL box, in a small 10' rack enclosure : this is is a metal box, I thought this could act as a Faraday bog cage... but no. Since I fixed the issue, the sensor is back there.

      The real cause was the wifi (mine ?) : my GW is placed next to a tp-link wifi access point, which was configured for choosing the best channel...
      So what must have happened is that when some neighboors started to heavily use their 2.4GHz wifi (spanning over channels 7 THROUGH 13 and probably even 14), I started getting holes. Either because of the neigbour, or because my AP was switching to a channel interfering with the mysensor RF24 configured channel.

      Surprisingly, setting mysensors RF24 channel to 100, or even 123... did not help at all even if as I understand it, these should be outside of the wifi channels used in France (??)

      How I fixed this :

      • used a "wifi analyser app" to choose wisely
      • configured my AP to use a fixed 2.4GHz channel (I'm trying to only use 5GHz anyways)(I chose wifi channel 4)
      • configured mysensors to use RF24 channel #1 (#define MY_RF24_CHANNEL 1)

      Since then, I got absolutely no hole in my data !

      Last thought : how is it possible that a consumer wifi AP (my neighbor's "FREEwifi" DSL box) is spanning over more than half the 2.4GHz spectrum ? isn't that extremely selfish ??

      posted in Troubleshooting
      Frederic Schaer
      Frederic Schaer
    • RE: Biulding my 1st PCB for an arduino nano + mysensors... anyone ?

      So... unless someone says otherwise...

      looks like I wrongly connected the NRF module on the schema (and hence on pcb) : I connected for instance SCK to pin 13, instead of "pin D13" which is physical pin 16 on nano v3 footprints.
      Same for all NRF pins... DOH !

      Noob error I presume...

      posted in Hardware
      Frederic Schaer
      Frederic Schaer
    • Biulding my 1st PCB for an arduino nano + mysensors... anyone ?

      Hi

      I just started playing with kicad... beware, noob ahead 😉

      So, I'm trying to design a PCB for an arduino nano + Mysensors, battery powered.
      I've read stuff here and there, and tried to include a way to measure battery, I included an DS18b20 onboard and a +5V battery booster to power the board with 2xAA batteries...

      I'd like to know if someone could check what I've done and could tell me if what I've done looks ok or teribly wrong... before I go ahead and start ordering 10 pieces just to find out the stuff doesn't work 😉

      I tried to mimic the easy newby Mysensors PCB board which is both meant for arduino pro mini and with an old kikad + libraries which I was unable to find... (yes, I've since found that pro minis should consume less power, I'll order some when I'm finished playing with my nanos 😉 )

      So here is my schema :
      0_1541966084467_schema.png

      And the PCB layout which, according to the debugger, is "ok"...
      0_1541966463226_pcb.png

      I can add other files if requested, or even all the kikad (v5) files if needed, I'm just unsure I should attach these as is like the images here, or as a zip, or ?

      Many thanks to anyone taking the time to read this :]
      Best regards

      posted in Hardware
      Frederic Schaer
      Frederic Schaer