I made some good progress tonight and was able to get the USB Moteino to work as the gateway.

It turned out the problem was that I had the incorrect serial port settings in Apps>Develop Apps>Serial Port Configuration. I pretty much had all the wrong settings in there. The Baud rate was wrong and I had selected the wrong device in "used by device". I fixed those settings and now it works.

To test it I used another Moteino to read a light sensors and report back to the Vera. That worked without a problem.

The next step is to find out how to create custom sensors that aren't in my Arduino Examples.

Thanks for all of your help everyone.

@korttoma I'm wondering if something is corrupted on the Vera because it should see the Moteino. It has a FTDI FT231XS chip so I'd think it should work.

I guess I'll also try getting the ESP8266 Wifi gateway to work even though that has problems too.

I followed the instructions for a serial gateway but unfortunately it just doesn't work. It looks like the Vera cannot talk to it.

Here's what I'm working with: I have a couple of Moteino R5 USB devices that I bought a while back. They have the built-in RFM69 tranceiver.
https://lowpowerlab.com/shop/moteinousb

My plan is to hook one up to the Vera to use as the gateway, and then the other will be my sensor node. I'm going to hook a DHT11 to it so it can measure temperature and humidity.

I opened the GatewaySerial sketch from the MySensors-master folder (which for some reason is completely different than the SerialGateway sketch on this page: https://www.mysensors.org/buil/serial_gateway) and edited the file. I had to comment out the NRF24 and uncomment the RFM69 entry. I uploaded the sketch to the Moteino.

I checked the Moteino via serial monitor and see it doing its thing:

0;255;3;0;9;Starting gateway (RRNGA-, 2.0.0)
0;255;3;0;9;TSM:INIT
0;255;3;0;9;TSM:RADIO:OK
0;255;3;0;9;TSM:GW MODE
0;255;3;0;9;TSM:READY
0;255;3;0;14;Gateway startup complete.
0;255;0;0;18;2.0.0
0;255;3;0;9;No registration required
0;255;3;0;9;Init complete, id=0, parent=0, distance=0, registration=1

I then log onto the Vera and attempt to create the gateway device. I uploaded the LUUP files and basically followed the instructions on this page: https://www.mysensors.org/controller/vera

However after I create the Arduino device, it says "Lua Startup Failure". And that's it, I'm dead in the water there. I did try it again with the ESP8266 as the device and I get no errors, it just doesn't seem to work. But I figured I'd start from the basics and concentrate on getting the serial version to work first. I see posts from a couple of years ago stating that you have to use the nano for a gateway. Is that still a problem? Because mine is an Uno clone, not a nano.

@TheoL said:

Going the MySensors way makes things really easy, because MySensors handles a lot of things for you. Things you'd otherwise have to program yourself.

I like easy. And I'm really bad at programming.

I have a couple of Arduinos and some RFM69 transceivers. Also, I guess it should be easy to make a RFM69/Ethernet gateway since I can attach a RFM69 to my ESP8266.

What is the easiest way to get started adding sensors?

I'm a complete noob that bought a Vera about a month ago. I've been playing with Arduinos for about 8 years but I'm still at noob level because my memory is extremely poor and I can't ever seem to memorize programming syntax or remember the details of anything I learned for very long.

What I'm trying to do is this: I want to make my own sensors that communicate with the Vera over ethernet. These can either be on an Arduino with ethernet/wifi transceiver or on an Adafruit feather Huzzah (ESP8266).

My question is how do I do this?

I read the tutorial about the ESP8266 on here but it seems to be aimed at using it to receive RFM69 data and then forward it onto your ethernet network. That's not what I'm trying to do here.

What I'm trying to do is directly read sensors (such as a DHT22) and then somehow send the readings to the Vera. I don't know how to do this.

Can anyone offer assistance?