Best posts made by rbrbrb

I have been enjoying the forum and website a lot, and I think with lots of modification, this project will work quite well for my future project. I have to say thank you to all those that helped incorporate signing into the messages, thats a critical feature and one that drove me to this solution.

My projects will all involve long distance communications (through forests almost) so range is important (and unfortunately, repeating nodes). So shielding the RF module was a concern I had.

I have just published a quick 3d model for an nRF24L01 module cover with some information on how it is used and built on Thingiverse. Rather than take space here I'll just include the link..
nRF24L01 Cover

I hope this helps some of you.. I thought by using a standard cover I could ensure good shielding, made it look good, and make it easier to ensure its completely covered. I have also made all my models use a license that allows you to print/order them online, although I am completely happy to let MySensors sell them of course if they find it valuable - and honestly they are so small and quick, you might be able to find lots of people that could print out a ton of them in one run for next to nothing..

One note - I did not state this on Thingiverse... just on this forum: Yes, I considered printing with metal bearing or conductive filament for additional shielding, but - using a non conductive plastic and covering it with foil makes more sense to me in terms of total cost and ease of creation. Plus there are no issues with shorting pins on the board.

Enjoy - thanks for everyone's contributions, hope this helps out some of ya'll.

I see the latest revision (2.1.0) has MY_RAM_ROUTING_TABLE_FEATURE or Ram-based Routing tables. Along with that, is an option to save the table into EEPROM every so often.

My application is probably going to top out at 32 nodes, but the distance could be up to 500 ft/150 m apart, and as they are battery powered, it is entirely possible they could run out of power. So I would want to rebuild the routing table on some of the nodes sometimes.. and simply power cycling a node to force a routing table rebuild would be fine.

My understanding (from reading the forum) is that flags don't rebuild routing if they lose connectivity (but I dont know if thats the case after a power cycle). If whats stored in eeprom isnt useful... will it be rebuilt at restart? If I use the RAM based table an set the EEPROM interval to something huge, will it effectively rebuild it on restart?

And of course, assuming the ram based table is an option.. how much RAM are we talking about? (given the field layout, ~32 nodes, probably not more than 6 child nodes per repeating node...) Or maybe someone can give me an idea of the math and how its stored in RAM/EEPROM..

Orcan someone suggest an entirely different solution? Like if there is a way to force a rebuild on parent link loss (I understand I would want to limit rebuilds, to not overuse EEPROM).

Thanks for any help. And also thanks for the work on the recent update. So far, its dropped right into both my GW and nodes and not caused a bit of problem!

PS - I may even have a 'roving' node which might quickly need to switch from one parent to another, so storing the routing table only in ram and being able to rebuild it quickly is a big requirement there...