Best posts made by NickBuilder

@AWI, thanks to your sketch and the concept of transmission quality measurement I did some adjustments to my setup.

I guess the most critical reason for the bad numbers shown on the meter for my network was due to a poor gateway. After applying the cheep and dirty EMI fix, a ground connected foil, and playing around with the transceiver power I finally got some good numbers on the meter.

So now I've placed a post-it on each module indicating a sort of long term fail average. A couple of them shows quite poor fail/miss values, 60-80 %. The best ones reaches around 5-15 % but this could be due to the gateway radio.

Actually I still don't know if the gateway transceiver is optimized. I should test some additional radio units.

Using large caps for the radio is recommended. There's no reason why not to use a bigger cap, > x00 uF. The ones rated for lower voltages are quite small in physical terms.

Thank you for this @AWI!

After migrating my few sketches to 2.0 and adjusting my baud rate to 38.4 kbps everything works!

Thank you @scalz for pushing me to 2.0 and @ToniA for pointing out the poor choice of baud rate for the 8 Mhz Arduino.

The recommended baud rate is now hard to miss in the 2.0 serial gateway example sketch. So moving to the latest API would possibly have solved my problems anyhow.

// Define a lower baud rate for Arduino's running on 8 MHz (Arduino Pro Mini 3.3V & SenseBender)
#if F_CPU == 8000000L
#define MY_BAUD_RATE 38400
#endif

Moving on to new challenges.

@Beat-Siegenthaler thanks for your effort, it didn't have any effect. The answer to my problems is somewhere in the response by AWI.

@AWI, somewhere around this problem is a big revelation for me regarding the MySensors library. As I said, I'm a beginner at this.

Answer me this, in the original power meter sketch there is the option to turn on sleep mode for the battery powered counter. You say that timers are off during deep sleep so this kind of sleep is not the "deep sleep" which you are referring to?

I guess there must be some strange thing with the above referenced sketch as for "sleep_mode = true" the "now counter" (millis() ) is expected to increase also during sleep (MySensors kind) but this is not happening as I have found out. What actually sleeps during sleep? How are timers and interrupts handled?

Am I missing some documentation here dealing with deviations from the underlying Aruino functionality? Perhaps the MySensors concept is more focused on users not wanting to fiddle that much with the sketches?

@bkl

Thank you @bkl! That is the best answer I could have wished for.

I've actually tried some similar prefixes to the port definition, such as "...:38400" and "...@38400" etc. I haven't found any documentation describing the available binding settings more than the port definition that you mention here at the top. I guess the documentation will be more complete for the Openhab 2.0 binding description.

Thank you for your great work here!

Thank you @scalz! That did the trick. Finally I can debug the code with readable serial feedback.

Ok @AWI so the example code is probably in need for some adjustments. Its kinda hard for a beginner like myself to learn the basics if also the example code suffers from questionable functionality. Or perhaps the functionality is ok but the code by itself is not clear enough to educate the masses.

I'm still having trouble understanding whats really happening when using the sleep() call. In my newest revision I'm not passing any interrupt conditions other than a time variable but still its obvious that the sleep is interrupted by the interrupt defined in the setup section. And as such, perhaps also some timer functionality is running while in a MySensors sleep.
Perhaps the API description is in need for some additional clarification.

Note: I've also deleted the attach and detach calls from the loop() section as this is probably handled by the sleep function (or other hidden code).