Best posts made by Stuart Middleton

Hi all,

I've been playing with MySensors for a while now but have finally gotten around to ordering some boards and components en masse. My plan is to automate my lighting for my entire house by replacing all of the light switches with nodes and placing a relay / dimmer node on each light fitting. I also want this to be independent to my home control system. I.e. I don’t want all my lights to stop working when I reboot my Pi for instance.

The way I see it is, either I write custom switch and light nodes, each of which can receive a command to tie light to switch and they then talk directly to each other, or I write software on the gateway to manage these connections and turn light A on when switch Q is switched etc. Either way I’d like to be able to re-assign things without dismantling the network and re-programming each device. I'd also like to monitor and record every switch event and be able to send light control messages via the gateway from external software when needed.

I was thinking the easiest way would be to put software on the gateway to map switches to lights which could be set up with external software but would be stand alone once set up. This option would be the simpler to write. However, a direct node-to-node system may be advantageous in the case of communication problems, with the proximity of the switch to light being an advantage. I don’t know how reliable larger networks are (I’m estimating 25-30 lights and 15-20 light switch nodes).

Also, would it be sensible to have this network completely separate to any other networks I may want in the house (temperature sensors for instance) in order to limit traffic?

I’m going to start work on this and I guess I’ll see how it evolves, but I would be interested in hearing other people’s opinions.

Thanks,
Stu

It depends on how much of a beginner you are. If you're OK with very basic electronics, happy to install some software on a Raspberry Pi and can connect a mains voltage wire to your boiler without killing yourself, then it's pretty simple.

At a minimum, you'll need a Raspberry Pi PC, a mains relay board controllable from the Pi (very cheap on eBay) and some cable.

I was just about to ask this very question!

So, assuming I don't get a connection on startup and drop into my main loop, what do I call periodically to try to connect?

I have a similar system that can operate autonomously. I do, however, need the main loop to be pretty much real-time, which means I can't afford a 3-second stall every X seconds while it tries to establish a connection with the gateway. Is there an asynchronous way to attempt a connection?

Thanks,

Thanks for the info. Regarding the rebooting of the controller. I was thinking if the controller held the logic to rough switches to lights, then rebooting (or having it crash) would mean the system would fail. Doing node-to-node or building the logic into the gateway means the lighting would always work with no controller attached. Hope that makes sense.

Excellent, thanks. Just what I need.

Awesome! That has saved me a lot of work

I knew I should have spent some time doing the research before emptying my ideas into the forum!

The project where I had to write to flash?

This was a network connected temperature and humidity sensor for a store room which had a built-in OLED display but was also network connected and hosted a website for graphing data output and displaying historical and real-time data. I wrote to flash so I could update the web page and other data OTA which was too big to fit in RAM or EEPROM and I didn't want to store on the SD card in case it was removed for any reason. It wasn't MySensors connected, unfortunately