I'm a volunteer at the local Makerspace and we use mysensors as a nice and simple way to hook up peoples projects to our local network without having dozens of ESP8266s or whatever all over the place. About half a year ago a new tech company moved in next door and it seems that during the evening hours the employees there get to work on hobby stuff because since then our Controller is being flooded with temperature, gas, light, motion etc, sensors that isn't ours. There are at least 40 sensors in the list that aren't created by us. Weve also had problems of their sensors that have an ID that one of our sensors also uses, overriding stuff in our database, creating some very odd power usage and temperature graphs.
I've thought of solving this with the signing or encryption thing. But it seems that that is computationally complex and wed need to add the little SHA chip to most our devices. Sadly i think we need to reprogram all our stuff. It doesn't seem like the neighbours mind our sensors messing with their network.
My question is does anyone have any recommendation? We do have code available for almost all devices in our net so it should be doable to reprogram most of them. I'm not so much worried about security, it's just annoying that the neighbours' stuff gets into our database.
Maybe theres an option to switch channels or to do some sort of handshake, a passphrase, or whatever? The signing and security page on the mysensors website seems sort of theoretical and i cant really find any examples of what to do. (I can't imagine it's as simple as only setting #define MY_SIGNING_SOFT and #define MY_SIGNING_SOFT_RANDOMSEED_PIN 7 in every sketch)
Any input would be very much appreciated!