Hello.
I dipped my toes into the world of home automation and discovered mysensors a couple of years ago. Then, I built (successfully) couple of relay actuators and stopped. Reason: I was in a rented apartment and couldn’t do anything permanent as such. Now, I have my own apartment and we have more or less settled in.
I would like to make our home a wee bit smarter- turn on/off lights , put a timer on a washing machine power source, humidity detection , gas leak detection , door sensors etc.
I have Arduinos pro mini and nrf24 radios with me from earlier.
My questions are the following

1. I used domoticz earlier but now more inclined towards openahb2. Is it advisable to make a switch ?
2. I read about zigbee and zwave. But I don’t have any existing hardware of these protocols but the only advantage I have so far read is that these protocols are “stable” or “safer”. I am in India and as far as I know there are no regulations as such when it comes to tinkering with home electricals (I still don’t want to burn down the house). In my scenario , will Mysensors be a stable solution?
3. I want some kind of redundancy in the setup - if my home network fails or is down, I should still be able to get things running. Hence, shall I also consider building a scene controller which can control the relays if a phone is unavailable or Alexa is down etc. basically it should be SO friendly or a guest friendly.
   I am planning to start tomorrow and looking for advice. Thanks.

@mfalkvidd Hi
On connecting the FTDI cable, the sensor works just fine. On disconnecting the FTDI it stops working. I figured its a power source issue. So, first tep to debug, I connected a 9v battery to RAW and GND - sensor node worked fine. I measured voltage across VCC and GND with the 9V battery - output across VCC and GND was 3.36 V and with 2 AA batteries connected through a buck boost converter, I measure 3.39 V across VCC and GND.

With the AA batteries, the small LED next to pin 9 on the pro-mini glows fainter than on the 9 V (across RAW/GND) and also blinks every few seconds.

Is there any way, I can fix this?

@mfalkvidd Hi, I got the setup running. However, as long as I am connected to the FTDI adapter, the sensor works fine. But when connected to 2 AA batteries through a buck up converter, the sensor does not communicate with domoticz.
I read that LM393 needs 3.3 V and I have measured the voltage across Vcc and Gnd on LM393, its 3.3 V

@zboblamont Hi, @zboblamont could you please guide me how you think the setup should be.

Thank you so much!

Thanks @mfalkvidd for your quick response. I get a sense how pulse power meter example will be useful. The sketch is too complex for me to understand. Correct me if I am wrong, that the pulse powermeter sketch is an overkill for my application. Will be asking for too much, if you could guide me on how to adapt the sketch .
Thanks.

Hi,
I have been searching for a solution to detect my doorbell and push actions (like pause Kodi, send notification to my phone etc)
To give a brief background, I live in a rented apartment and my doorbell is AC powered. There is internal wiring and I cannot bypass it and use an arduino input to the pushbutton.
What could work in my favour is that the doorbell has a LED which turns on for the duration of the chime. (there are two chimes for one push of the button and two long flashes of LED)
I have a fair idea of what could work - use a LDR to detect the LED blink or flash and send the output to Domoticz as a trigger, which then could be used to carry out other actions.
By now, you would have figured out that if this guy cannot work out this simple task, he must be a total noob; you got that right.

I have seen several doorbell posts and most require tinkering with the existing connections and in my case I want to use the flashing LED (about 3 seconds On with a break of 1.5 second and then 3 seconds on for every push of button).

How should I go about this. As I mentioned, I live in a rented apartment and I cannot mess with the existing setup without risking loosing my security deposit.

Please guide. Thanks

@Javier-Rubio I m not an expert- a complete novice.
I would suggest one of the following - trigger the relay through a controller or use one the the arduino relay example sketch in which relay is programmed to turn on and off every 1 second. This would help you validate if your wiring is correct or not.

@sundberg84 I used a 3904 transistor between the relay and arduino and it works just fine with 3.3 V Arduino pro mini 8 HMz.
(2N2222 also works, but I have many pieces of 3904 and just a few 2N2222, hence using 3904)