I'm looking into switching controllers (or perhaps using two controllers for a while to see which i prefer). What's worrying me is that i'm not 100% sure on what happens when i expose sensors to two gateways.

My question therefore is where can i find information on how sensors and gateways and controllers actually interact. So i can find out things like;

• is there a routing table on each sensors and is it possible for a sensor to transmit to two gateways attached to two separate controllers
• i am aware that radio is literally just a broadcast and anyone listening will hear, but will a gateway/controller 'drop' a package from a source it doesn't know? (like they have not gone trough pairing
• what is the behavior of a sensor broadcasting and receiving an ACK if there are two?
• does the controller actually do much?, i know some behavior is built into the (i'm generally using serial) gateways like sending out a discovery request on boot, does the controller keep track of ID's and assign them, or does a controller merely do responses for data that sensors ask for
• etc

I'm aware that i could just dig through the code and find this out myself but i'm hoping somebody has a write up on this or some design documentation i haven't been able to find myself yet.

Any input will be greatly appreciated!

Thank you for the thorough reply @mfalkvidd

I already had a look the pages you linked but some of the questions I had were only partially answered by those pages so I appreciate you taking the time to answer all of them.

Judging by your answers i'm not going to try two gateways. I will instead look into building an ethernet gateway or perhaps forwarding data from one controller to the next.

Signing is definitely something i want to implement too as my gateway seems to be picking up pacakges from a mysensors user near me!

Especially your statements about undefined behaviour in regards to ACKs were helpful.

Thanks again and apologies for replying as late as i did.

@skywatch while i obviously agree with the fact that i we can best change channels, i figured that while we're at it we might as well add encryption too. I don't insist on using any specific channel. I couldn't care less what channel's being used :)

That said, i tried recompiling my pi gateway wih the password and one sensor to start with using #define MY_ENCRYPTION_SIMPLE_PASSWD "mypassword" (shut off all other sensors). But i'm seeing all sorts of erroneous messages coming by, the one node is showing up on the gateway as a different ID every time.

I'll whip up a simple serial gateway next time i get the chance and try to use #define MY_ENCRYPTION_SIMPLE_PASSWD "mypassword" on both to see if the problem lies with how i configure the pi gateway

THanks for all the input everyone so far