I made a pull request over on github, if @martinhjelmare accepts it we should be good to go.

Well... I think I fixed it, let's hear it for documentation. Just when I had MQTT setup half way I got struck by the idea that there was some group flag for configure. And indeed there is, setting --my-serial-groupname=nodered did the trick making /dev/pts/X owned by group nodered and let Node-RED connect to it, writing and reading works just fine now.

Thanks @gohan for your input I think I would have gone the ethernet route in the end if this last test had failed.

@inso Did you sudo make install after building it? This command copies the service file and mysgw to their respective locations.

@zboblamont That is impressive, I thought more than 6 months is somewhat of a black magic trick due to the energy used to send stuff. I think my main mistake was using normally closed reed switches back than. Not knowing that there are normally open switches as well. How does this "every 10 liters" thing work using a reed switch? Am I misunderstanding something?

@eelledge That are some interesting ideas, I will definitely dig into this area.

@Yveaux Thank you for your patience with me nagging about that! I will give battery sensors another try and since I need to power the blinds anyways I will be able to upgrade my sensors if I am not happy with the battery setup.

@Yveaux said in How to power my sensors in a rental?:

For the door/window/temp/hum sensors I would still go for battery power. Using decent quality batteries these nodes should run for years easily on a single set.

So with future expansion of my network in mind would it not be easier to get a sufficient setup from the get go rather than put battery powered sensors "everywhere"? My first sensors (window/door) took one battery set (2x AA) down within 2-4 months. Over time this would cause a substantial number of battery usage. Sorry if this might seem silly, I just started 8 months ago so there are a lot of things about MySensors I do not know yet but I thought getting rid of the "energy problem" would make thinks easier.

Relays don't need continuous power per se (e.g. use a bistable relay) but running the the radio in Rx continuously requires a plugged power source.

I did not know that, will check them out. But my receivers will still have to be online all the time if I am not mistaken?

@Yveaux I had battery powered sensors in the past and some of my outside sensors still run on battery. But since I am a very lazy busy man and always forget changing batteries I migrated my setup over to plugs.

This is my current setup, numbers in brackets will be estimated number for new place:

• Door/Window 4x (6x)
• Temp/Hum sensors for every room 3x (5x)
• Relays for blinds 6x (11x)
• more to come...

My thinking was since for those blind relays I would need plugs anyway a central power source would make things easier for me. 48 V would give me enough headroom to expand my setup further without having to fight voltage drop or pumping huge amps.

Hey guys,

the Mrs and I will move to a new place in April. After checking out the new apartment I started to worry about how to migrate my existing MySensors setup when it comes to powering my nodes.

Some background:

• Right now most sensors are powered via smartphone chargers which was working great even though having all those plugs triggered my OCD
• Our new place is a rental so any "destructive" solution is impossible
• Since it is an older building there are very limited sockets which makes my current setup somewhat unfeasible as it would pretty much clog all sockets (old place 5+ sockets per room, new place 2 (3 tops))

After thinking about this for some time I came up with a solution that (at least to me) sonds feasible: I would get myself a 48V power supply (to limit voltage drop) and connect it to one plug in our new living room (center of the apartment). Then I could get some cable ducts and create a star topology to every room in the apartment. Every node would get its own buck converter to reduce 48V to 5V/3.3V respectively.

Does this sound like a solution that could work? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Any recommendations and hints are very much appreciated!

Cheers

@inso Did you sudo make install after building it? This command copies the service file and mysgw to their respective locations.

Well... I think I fixed it, let's hear it for documentation. Just when I had MQTT setup half way I got struck by the idea that there was some group flag for configure. And indeed there is, setting --my-serial-groupname=nodered did the trick making /dev/pts/X owned by group nodered and let Node-RED connect to it, writing and reading works just fine now.

Thanks @gohan for your input I think I would have gone the ethernet route in the end if this last test had failed.

@gohan Yes I know but now I can no longer just wildcard-dump every event on my mosquitto instance into my DB as I need to filter out the mysensor-in and -out topics.

Yes I came to the conclusion that this might be my only option even if it sucks as I have to subscribe to all events from MySensors, process them with Node-RED and republish again which screws my logging a bit. Right now I have another flow subscribed to "#" and write every event into my DB.

Since I have everything talking to mosquitto setup to follow Homie Convention I was hoping for only having my MQTT broker bombarded with compliant messages and have Node-RED convert everything (assign device names, etc. using a SQLite DB) from serial so the rather cryptic MySensors topics do not show up there.

Unfortunately adding my nodered user to dialout did not bring the hoped success. I still get premission denied messages after a reboot of my raspberry.

As my console print above shows the /dev/pts device belongs to tty but adding nodered to tty did not work out either (since the group only has write privileg). I have no idea how to fix this other then chowning the port to nodered but that feels wrong for me after years using linux based systems.