@NeverDie I am happy to report that my batteries arrived yesterday!

@NeverDie
I'm going to dissipate the energy through a 25 ohm resistor. It will take about 24 hours to perform one capacity test. Often times I read that the full capacity won't be available until after a few charge-discharge cycles. 2 resistors, 4 batteries, 3 tests each. Assuming that I stay on top of it, it will take at least a week of testing which won't start until I get my 25 ohm resistors. I'll post a link to my full write up.

OK, I did my battery test. @NeverDie @Nca78 @mfalkvidd
You can find it here

The batteries from Newegg and Fullbattery are good ones.

If you going to buy a large quantity and looking for a low price, then you should buy 1 or two and test them as I have done here. You might have to "kiss a lot of toads" before you find a good vendor, though.

OSD

@hubertus I'm not getting the description of you setup. Perhaps a sketch would be good?

Wen I need serial communication, with the Arduino, I use SoftwareSerial on two other I/O lines. That way I can debug real time, SoftwareSerial is slower but you're only doing temperature so 9600BAUD would be fin

Also, don't try to do too much at once. Break the task down into small, manageable sections. You have a lot of different things going on, get one thing going at a time.

OSD

@eiten said in Saving last known good state, but not in EEPROM:

utility meter in home assistant

This is exactly what I am seeking! Thank you!

PS I truly enjoy reverse translating! It teaches me how to better understand my first language and it gives me alternate words to use in searches. So a second thank you!

"Regelmässiges Zurücksetzen" would be best translated to English in this context as "Periodic Reset". In the English version of Home Assistant it is called "Meter reset cycle" (I remember seeing "keep dry" translated as "do not take in shower with you"

I think it's pretty cool. I can hear my spousal unit asking, "What are you doing with all that data?"

-OSD

@NeverDie I like your suggestion for solar panels, though my application only requires 1x 5W panel. And I like the idea of dismantling the power packs.

I think we differ in our approaches, though. I seem to enjoy living on the "bleeding edge", that is, I'm more of a risk taker. My first house solar system, 2.8kW, was installed in 2004. When I upgraded to 4.2kW, I took the 14 panels and installed them on my hillside, so now I'm a net energy exporter. The 2.8kW portion is still producing at 85% of nameplate, shows little environmental degradation (sealant, too), and has paid for itself. The reward outweighed the risk.

In taking risks, I learn much. Yes, I have a quite a few scars, actually and metaphorically. I have discovered a philosophy: Everything is an experiment. The point of an experiment is to learn something. So every experiment is a successful, just that sometimes the desired results are not realized. Eg. leaving an Arduino outdoors results in a short useful life. Spraying on a sealant extends the outdoor life.

Good discussion. Thanks for the ideas

OSD

@NeverDie

I'm new-ish to MySensors. I came here because I was looking for a gateway from RF24 to MQTT and I'm well on my way to getting the MySensors version to work.

Why isn't MySensors working? I find two things really frustrating. The documentation is spotty at best. It's taking me days to get as far as I have. When I write up my own procedure for my own documentation, I find it's maybe just 20 steps, but each step needs a detailed explanation. For example, through a lot of trial and error, I found that to turn on the relay in the relay with button example I had to publish a message of 1 to the MQTT topic mysensors-in/13/1/V_LIGHT/0/2. Only later did I find the Serial Protocol 2.x. But it does't show a V_LIGHT nor S_LIGHT. Yes, I figured out that example is out of date, but that's part of the point I'm trying to make. And how did my node ID become 13 and stay 13 when I press reset on the Arduino?

You can see more detail on my frustrations in the MQTT gateway discussion

Which segues into my other frustration. about documentation. Many members offering advice do not provide links to their statements. For example, in the MQTT gateway discussion:

gohangohan MOD 3 Sept 2017, 13:15
(at)Richard-van-der-Plas "Just clone the 2.2 dev instead of the stable, the rest is the same
(emphasis mine)

How does one do that? Particularly in a world where case is important and there are three different quote marks, (excuse me, one is sometimes known as a gravé) all with different meanings.

There are many like you @NeverDie who know MySensors in-and-out. I am an experienced hardware and software engineer, retired (one of the engineers that developed ink jet printing and one of the engineers that developed a navigation system for the 747) It's not like I don't have a fundamental understanding of what's going on here. I have yet to find a way to search the forum other than using google search.

Don't get me wrong, the MySensors concept is great and functions pretty well, but if it's not well documented, then it is useless. Then when someone asks a simple questions only to get an answer with no explanation of the how, the newbie and experienced alike don't bother with the forum because the forum offers no help, either.

We had a poster at HP (when it was a great company) "No job is done until the paperwork is complete" (image of person sitting on the toilet)

@NeverDie It is my understanding, though I can't wrap my head around it, that it is the length of the conductor that makes the antenna tuned to a certain frequency. If this is the case, you could run your antenna around the edge of your circular pcb which would make the effective radius only slightly bigger.

I would be interested, too. I found just the sensor on Amazon and it looks like the meter is just timing the pulses per second. With a constant, one can determine the LPM You may be able to tap off of the sensor input, then through a resistor voltage divider make the output of the sensor compatible with your micro controller (Arduino). Using Processing on your computer you can capture the data from the Arduino.

Have fun!

OSD

The author has done some good work ensuring good design practices; trace separation, fuses, etc. but I don't see any extra I/O brought out on this particularl switch. You would have to carefully solder to the chip itself, and modify the code a bit.

You could use magnetic switches. Put a magnet on the blinds and the switch in window sill.

The author notes that this is not an Arduino, but uses the same chip that the Arduino uses. The author doesn't explain how the chip is programmed. This method could have been used.

It may be just as easy to use an RF Nano with a little power supply. This suggestion is not nearly as robust as the author's. For example, these power supplies have gotten bad reviews mainly because the mains power traces are too close together. I justify using them because in all likelihood a failure will pop the power supply and probably the Nano, too, noting that these are cheaper than the fuses you would put in to protect them. I am fully aware of the risks involved in doing this, and you should be, too (eg. burning down your house).

-OSD

I think it's pretty cool. I can hear my spousal unit asking, "What are you doing with all that data?"

-OSD

I'm glad that worked!

Good call @skywatch !

wait() is a MySensors function that looks for MySensors operations that run asynchronously to loop(). Search for "What is the difference between delay() and wait()"

I have experienced the symptoms you describe. I put a wait() after functions that send MySensors data: send() and present() (but for some reason not sendSketchInfo()?). If I'm using an MQTT gateway Its 500 and 4000 milliseconds, respectively; Serial, 100 and 500.

I think this will work for you! Letting us know your results helps someone else that is experiencing what you are.

OSD

I'm going to make an assumption: You have connected to Home Assistant many times during your development.

Home Assistant is not very flexible with MySensors. If you change Child_IDs it sometimes ignores the change.

Try deleting your MySensors device. This is not a friendly operation. Assuming that your Uno is acting as a serial gateway and as your sensor monitory device,

• disconnect the Uno from your computer. th
• In HA: settings-->Devices and Services-->n DEVICES in MySensors integration-->click on device your going to delete-->3 vertical dots next to Remove Device from MySensors-->>Remove
  Then restart HA
• Developer Tools-->restart-->restart
  After HA is restarted, plug your Uno back in

If your MySensors gateway is MQTT you have to stop the MQTT gateway and delete all vestiges of your device in the MQTT broker (I use MQTT Explore to do this which has to be running befor you do anything to see the topics that will be erased.)

Let us know if that fixed it.

OSD

I had many problems trying to bring my motor blinds into my home automation. What I ended up doing was having an Arduino Nano push the buttons of a remote control.

For the Arduino part, I started with the GatewaySerial example.

What this project shows is how to connect to a remote and get some primative feedback from the remote.

So far it works pretty well.

Find the project on my github page

-OSD

I want to thank @FcNanoLed. I had long thought about a serial gateway. This would be a way to add I/O to a linux computer. In the process of trying to help, I built up a linux machine running virtual box. In the virtual machine I ran Home Assistant The not well documented part of that was to connect the USB port of the computer to the virtual machine (settings-->USB-->USB Device Filters) (note that one can buy a refurbished PC for about the same price as an equivalently configured RPi)

So thanks for the inspiration!

@MasMat I won't say I'm better informed, as I just scanned some of the documentation. It seems that ESPnow combines many of the OSI layers. These layers exist for a reason and adnerence to them allows for the extent of the internet.

That said, we don't want our IoT devices to be part of the internet. The low overhead of MySensors communication is required for MySensors to run on Arduinos and inexpensive radios.

Espressif combines theses two at a lower cost. I need to look into it!

I found Getting Started with ESP-NOW (ESP32 with Arduino IDE) It's mesh is limited to 20 devices. MySensors is theoretically limited to 254, but in practice my experience indicates about 30.

I have found the Arduino Nano and the nRF24 very robost, though the tolerances on the radio make it "wabbly" Again, my experience, the ESP8266 is a little fragile (smoked a few) though the radio is awesome.

I have a project I call The Universal Light Switch. My alpha testing is 20 ESP8266 devices Which uses 20 IP addresses on my router. I discovered that my home routers can only handle about 25 WiFi devices. So ESPnow has my attention.

I saw that, too, but I wasn't sure. This is documented here
bool present(uint8_t childSensorId, uint8_t sensorType, const char *description, bool echo);

@FcNanoLed
I have not used a configuration where a Nano is connected directly to the controller. I assume your program has
#define MY_GATEWAY_SERIAL
because I when I compiled a sample program without it and without a radio I got the error:
#error No forward link or gateway feature activated. This means nowhere to send messages! Pretty pointless.

Your code is probably right, but if you posted the entirety we may be able to find the error. Are CHILD_ID_ARMED, and the IDX_xxxx variables? If this is the case, something could be changing them, which could create the ghosts. Typically, compiler directives are used, eg.

#define CHILD_ID_ARMED 0
#define IDX_PORTAIL2 123

I can't think of anything else right now

-OSD