Best posts made by stevebus

Hi all,

I've just returned to doing some mysensors work after a long absence. I'm just now trying the 2.0 release of the library (from 1.4 and 1.5 previously) and, since I know dev work can be underappreciated sometimes, I just wanted to pay my compliments to all those who contributed to the 2.0 release!

I just rev'ed my Ethernet gateway and several sensors to 2.0. VERY clean, very quick, and very cool.

If it's not said often enough, very well done guys.

(BTW - since I'm just getting started back again in earnest, I'm sure you'll next see me post some issues and questions/complaints :-), but I wanted to open with appreciation first!).

--Steve

Hey guys,

quick update: got this working, at least on the gateway side -- haven't tried hooking up a node yet, that's next... Once I confirm that works, I'll add SOLVED to the title of this.

For the gateway, I went digging through the new driver code, looking for things to try and adding some debug writes, and found the code in RFM69_Initialise() where, if MY_RFM69_RST_PIN is defined, it will reset the radio. I already had the RST line on the RFM69HCW wired up, and had previously (with the old driver) manually added code to do it, but it didn't help...

But with the new driver from the dev branch (used by #define MY_RFM69_NEW_DRIVER) I just added

#define MY_RFM69_RST_PIN 6

to my sketch and now I get...

0;255;3;0;9;0 MCO:BGN:INIT GW,CP=RPNGA---,VER=2.2.0-beta
0;255;3;0;9;26 TSM:INIT
0;255;3;0;9;28 TSF:WUR:MS=0
0;255;3;0;9;36 TSM:INIT:TSP OK
0;255;3;0;9;39 TSM:INIT:GW MODE
0;255;3;0;9;43 TSM:READY:ID=0,PAR=0,DIS=0
0;255;3;0;9;46 MCO:REG:NOT NEEDED
IP: 192.168.0.215
0;255;3;0;9;1350 MCO:BGN:STP
0;255;3;0;9;1353 MCO:BGN:INIT OK,TSP=1

I had read somewhere that the Adafruit breakout normally pulls RST high and supposedly resets itself at power-on, but I guess that wasn't enough... Explicitly resetting the radio seems to have done the trick and may be required for the Adafruit RFM69HCW breakout.

Going to see if I can get the raspberry pi GW working now, since my curiosity is piqued

Thank you all for the help and input!

--Steve

Ha! yeah - actually there are more than one of us (MSFT employees) here.

I'm not eligible for the competition (never am) because I'm an employee, but definitely encourage the community here to put the best ideas forward. There are some incredibly smart folks here and really cool projects.

Very nice project and thanks for sharing. I have a deer feeder in a corner of my yard, and it's always getting empty without me knowing. I'm planning on this exact same type of project to measure the level of corn in the feeder. Would love to see your final schematic and parts list (as it changed across the thread), but no worry if you don't have it as I'm sure I can figure it out.

Thanks again for sharing.

Thanks all,

@LastSamurai - good catch on bonding the grounds. totally missed that. brain fart on my part. Getting good data in serial mon now.

@martinhjelmare and @mfalkvidd - thanks. I thought it was something like that. While the hang described in the original thread occurs regardless of power source (even powered from PC) and appears to be a separate issue, I did see some different erratic behavior earlier and the batteries measured at 2.91V. So probably getting close to threshold or something. And maybe it gets drug down when the radio transmits or the DHT11 reads or something, resulting in erratic behavior.

Good find. I bet based on some of the projects I've seen discussed here, this community could submit some really cool stuff!!

disclosure #1 - I work for Microsoft (as an IoT specialist)
disclosure #2 - I don't have anything to do with this contest (but I wish I did)...

Hey guys,

Another update... and an admission :-).

After playing with it some more, it looks like I mis-read the details on how the Adafruit breakout treats the reset pin. I hard connected it to ground and it now works without setting the RST_PIN define. Apparently we just need to explicitly pull the RST pin low (which makes sense). Having the 'define' set was doing that in code earlier.

You do have to have the new drivers, but don't have to fool with the reset pin. The GW works in both Arduino and raspberry pi now.

thanks for thinking through this with me.

done! Thanks @mfalkvidd