The problem is that temperature alone doesn't cause the freezing. When there is clear sky things on the ground can get 2 or 3 degrees colder than air temperature because of a specific infrared radiation window that is radiating heat into space more than it is absorbing from the atmosphere. That's why a good forecast is normally needed
You forgot the MY_NODE_ID in the node sketch
I'd consider harvesting anything that can store small quantities of energy and then convert them into usable energy. The other project you made with the booster being powered by a small cap is more hervester like
Why do you need to measure the solar intensity?
I am just curious but once you detect the buds have frozen, what are going to do? I am no expert in plants, but I think they can withstand some degrees below freezing for a short time before sustaining damage so it would make it harder to estimate if any damage has been done
This isn't really harvesting, is it? Shouldn't be harvesting the collecting of even the lower voltages to be stored in the supercap?
I couldn't because they are packed together, but it was something I was expecting anyway. I had them completely discharged every now and then when the arduino went crazy and drained them out.
what I meant is that they don't actually go to 0v even if you short them as you will always be able to measure some small voltage. I am no expert but my bet is that that 0.5/0.6v is kind of their bottom line where they don't hold any more useful energy below that.
For balancing there are SAB Mosfets that help to keep all the supercaps on the same voltage, but the reverse charge issue is the same for all series circuits, also LiPo worn out batteries can get to 0V and then getting reverse charged with all the consequent risk of fire.
On the cheap supercaps I have they hold the 0.6v, they don't go to zero
The 1.1v reference could be + or - 10%, but a small ceramic cap on near the analog pin should help to stabilize the reading. Also taking 3 measures and then sending the average is a good way of minimizing errors
No idea really, the box was sealed. I suspect they might have gotten unbalanced. About charge cycles I don't think they were a problem since they probably had less than 400 (1 cycle a day). They were cheap Chinese parts, so poor quality for sure given the self discharge rate they had. Given the cost of a LiFePO4 battery compared to supercaps, I think I'm going to take the battery route and ditch the whole solar power. I have an identical node running on a single AA LiFePO4 and in 8 months it barely discharged even if it is sending 4 values every 10 minutes
Ok, after almost a year 3 out of 5 5.5v supercaps started leaking... Rip
The send function returns a value, so you can check if it was successfully sent or not and in case retry
@korttoma if you have a library that can read the values from the sensor, you can easily add the mysensors code
you are at the limit of the radio range I'd say so randomly it looses a message, so you need to either increase power or get a better antenna (I hope you aren't using any buck/boost converter as power supply)
Maybe next time you could add a flash chip for Ota firmware and use I2C sensors to make wiring a lot simpler. You may consider using one of the many pcb available on openhardware.io to shrink down the size of that node 
If you have your node close to the relay, you could install one of those mains voltage detectors to have a feedback on the status
Have you tried with a debouce? Just in case...
@neverdie so will it be able to run mysensors also in sleep mode? I got lost with all those chip codes
Have you tried another controller like mycontroller?
the problem is knowing what kind of gases are relased during print and have matching sensors.
Try a normal radio on gateway instead of the PA lna
Why would you want to use the 5v arduino on batteries?
Can't you just use the arduino ide serial monitor?
You can do it on the gateway at least
Uncomment the my_debug and you should see all the debug info.
Well I don't usually use more than 2 Com ports, so I never had a problem
It can help, but fortunately most programs do refresh the com ports list automatically
You could distribute not compiled and use a script that changes the password and then compiles the gateway
It depends a lot on the sensor type so minor changes need to be made on sketch to make it handle the inverse logic.
Try low power on both radio and put them 3 meters away. Those unshielded pa modules are a pain with higher power settings
Try using nrf24 normal module, not PA, on gateway and see if you get better results
I think there is a define to enable it, but I don't remember well as I use the dual optiboot. Maybe @tekka could help
No, I meant looking at the serial debug while it is doing the fota
Do you see any errors on the node serial debug output?
@heizelmann have you tried to use it normally in order to check the long term stability before going trough all that trouble?
@crankycoder for sensor is not a huge problem, but if you have a button controlling an actuator then latency is bad. Also lost messages would require multiple send and thus reducing battery life.
There are also other solutions that have I2C bus pins on the shield and if you are going to make a battery powered node, I'd suggest to use an I2C sensor as it will be much more battery friendly
Atc will try to keep TX rssi above - 70db by adjusting the TX power. If you move the node away from gateway you should see TX rssi decrease until - 70 then the power should start rising as you get farther away
A larger topology would most likely have high latency, messages could get lost and need to be resent more often than usual small network
@harrdy remember to take a few readings and average out the battery value
The sensor will be attached to the arduino, not to the shield
I had a pro mini running fine for months in my outdoor solar sensor but I had to replace it as it was no longer working, with led flashing all the time. Later I managed to recover it by replashing bootloader and sketch again.
I had reports about switching to a different bootloader (like minicore) solved similar issues, as the stock bootloader sometimes doesn't like the sleep state
With 2 mini solar panels on the sides and an harvesting circuit, you could run it indefinitely
@berkseo it could be that not many people are using node to node communications. Good job you found a way
If you have a working code that works on esp8266, you can use it as a node or as a gateway with sensors and no radio module.
Mysensors is just taking care of transporting the data, if you have a sketch that can read data from any sensors, you can then send those values via mysensors to any controller supported.
@เธฃเธญเนเธฃ-เธญ isn't that the same name as a seller on aliexpress?
Zigbee, like zwave and enocean, also uses sleeping nodes while mains powered nodes usually act as repeater nodes to increase range of the network
If you can find a sketch that can decode the serial data from the inverter, sending those values to domoticz is very easy
I'm using them, I got the ones from soshine and the stated capacity is just a little more than the one measured by the charger.
If you want complete isolation between relays and arduino you don't need to share common ground if your relays have optocouplers.
That looks really good. Did you made an estimate of the average cost of single node?
I still don't understand what the final goal is with all those options
@franz-unix I'd go for a LDO (le33 or mcp1700) to power the board and remove all voltage regulators
Do you mean to connect multiple sensors to the same pin on the arduino?
Normal HA is ok, the problem is hass.io
Could be a lot of things, start with capacitors on the radio modules, try using other modules, etc etc
Reboot each node and look at the presentation until you find node is 2
Look on gw debug if you see any message coming from the node
Get some LiFePo4, like the kit from soshine (4 batteries + 2 connectors)
Look on openhardware.io, there are already plenty of designs if you want to get some ideas
You could also consider the approach of iotappstory.con
@inso remember to unregister the service and then make a new make install of the new gw
the "10 ANT" pad is not very close to the ANT hole, are you sure it is not affecting the antenna length?
Ok, keep us posted. Also make sure about trace length for the antenna as I remember there should be some specs about it.
What boards definitions are you using for arduino?
I usually enable wdt at beginning of loop and disable it before sleep
If you can program it yourself, it could work but you need to figure out where the rs485 is connect to the arduino to be sure
If you don't need specific features in 2.3, then stick to 2.2 that works well.
I'm talking about normal rfm69w, the rfm69hw are the high power ones but the footprint is the same
Nice. You may consider adding a small connector for external antenna
There have been versions in the past that were not backward compatible, but usually it is not necessary to have same version on gw and nodes
github and if you attach the rfm69 verbose output both for gw and node
I was talking to @tekka some time ago about the issues I had on 2.3 alpha, I don't know what he did after that.
Or meanwhile just use the ethernet gw
If I got it right it is related to RPI3, on RPI2 it should work
@mirodin you actually need only mysensors-in and mysensors-out topics and their subtopics
RPI gw uses new driver only. I am sticking to 2.2 for now as I had some timing issues with the RPI3, if you make a gw with an arduino it would probably work better with 2.3
The capacitor is probably the best option to solve stability issues on nrf24
you could send millis every time you send data, if you see the millis starting from 0 you had a reset. Maybe there is a more elegant way of doing it
it is not a solution, but you could switch to ethernet GW and you will avoid all the permissions problems.
wasn't it the problem of the missing permission on the dialup group?
You could try to check istransportready or sanitycheck and if they return false after 4 or 5 times call a delay (60000) and if you enabled the avr watchdog it should reset the node
you could use 3 ni-mh and get rid of the regulator, that drains battery fast unless you use a low quiescent current one.
