Hey, Anthony.

Yeah, the cube is the temperamental bit. It forgets the sensors every few weeks/months.

I have opened up the python web page to the web, secured behind a password, and it's OK to use. I mainly use it to monitor the system and look at the pretty graphs. I think the CC1101 with OpenHAB or custom software is the way to go.

Let me know if you get the Pi and CC1101 installed. I can't recall exactly what was wrong but I think it may be one of the packages that it tries to download no longer exists. It's something I really want to get fully working the way I want it, but to be honest it does a good job anyway.

Stu

Hey, @demusss. I'm still using the python script talking to the MAX! Cube. It's a little temperamental but works most of the time. I finally got my hardware (CC1101) but, if I remember right, the homegear instructions listed above don't seem to work anymore. There's a missing module? I can't recall now. I'm sure I could sort it out but I just haven't had time.

Ideally, I'd like to talk to the system myself via the CC1101 and write the software myself instead of relying on OpenHAB but time is the limiting factor, unfortunately.

Maybe I'll pick it up again this weekend and try and get the CC1101 comms working.

Stu

@Pigsy I've gone back to this in an attempt to get it working with Google Home. However, it isn't as simple as it first seemed. I can't get it working with the ESP MAC address so don't know what it's doing. I suspect the WeMo app would need to register it first which isn't possible since it doesn't emulate that part of the setup.

If I had an actual real device I could probably sniff the network and emulate this part too, then (assuming the WeMo servers don't require a WeMo reserved MAC) it may work. Unfortunately I don't have a WeMo device or the time to reverse engineer the app setup so for now it's just Alexa compatible :(

@Sergio-Rius Oh well, it doesn't look too hard to adapt for the error.

Thanks, @LastSamurai, I went and compared the DIrty PCB files with the v1.3 ones on OpenHardware.IO and they are indeed different. It looks like the DIrtyPCB link is out of date and still has the error on them.
@Sergio-Rius would be very grateful if you could update those files :)

I've been running a small test setup for some time with just 1 node and 1 gateway. For some reason, in the past week or so, I've noticed that the "present" doesn't either send or get to the gateway. I'm using MYSController to look at the messages but if I delete the node and let it re-register itself, it only gets its name and sometimes 1 of the 4 sensors presented. It once got 2 of them. I don't think it's a transmission problem as the node can happily send hundreds of quick fire messages without dropout.

Has anyone encountered this? Can anyone think of a reason this would happen before I start debugging the code?

Thanks,

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 :)

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! :)

I've been involved in a project recently that needed to write to FLASH memory at runtime. This made me think about OTA updates of MySensor nodes. As I understand it, MySensors uses an external EEPROM to store the update in then rewrites the FLASH from this EEPROM. I'm thinking, would it be possible to do this without the EEPROM?

This is what I'm thinking... Let's say your sketch takes up 55% of atmega328 FLASH (based on a recent sketch of mine). You can write an independent sketch that could handle comms, downloading and flashing that can sit at top of memory. Assuming it is small enough to fit in with your existing sketch and any replacement sketch you may upload. It would obviously have to be a little more intelligent than a dumb flash bootloader. For instance, it would need to know if a download has failed or is partial and be able to communicate this back to the controller and only reboot when the entire new sketch is flashed.

I think it would be a pain to write and be very limited in flexibility regarding the size of the sketches you can upload, but it would mean you could make nodes without having custom boards with EEPROM built-in or adding EEPROMs to your simple designs.

Am I crazy, or is this something that would be useful to some? I'd certainly find it useful.

It is indeed. But I've designed a home lighting control system that is completely stand alone so needs no controller. You can still add a controller if you want, but the actual messages and switching are all contained either in the nodes or on the gateway. I wanted a robust system that didn't rely on a separate PC to function when there was no real need for one.

So for me, being able to add Alexa into the lighting system without relying on a controller is useful.

Of course, most people use some kind of controller with their setup. My implementation of a MySensors network for my home lighting system doesn't need a controller so this is very useful for me.

Hey, all,

I don't know if this has been posted before... I stumbled across a great Arduino library which makes an ESP8266 emulate a Belkin WeMo home automation device. (up to 14 devices per chip!). Any of these devices on your network will show up as a compatible, controllable device in the Alexa or GH app so you can add them as home automation devices and control them via voice commands.

I was thinking, it would be trivial to embed this into a node or gateway to receive commands from Alexa or GH and send the messages to any of the nodes on your MySensors network!

https://github.com/witnessmenow/esp8266-alexa-wemo-emulator

You need to hard-code your wifi access and the device names into the setup code. Device discovery by Alexa is fully automatic and as soon as your ESP8266 is on wifi the Alexa app sees it and the device names. Google Home requires you to manually type in the device's MAC address (maybe for security?). I've tried this with Alexa but I couldn't be bothered to find the MAC address of my ESP8266 last night so didn't fully test the GH integration, but there's no reason it shouldn't work.

Excellent, thanks, just what I needed to know :)

Do the nodes keep their ID with the gateway if i power cycle the whole system? I.e. if I've got nodes 1,2,3,4 & 5 and power down the gateway and all of the nodes, remove node 1 and power back up will I just see nodes 2,3,4 & 5 numbered the same? If I reconnect the missing node will it show up as node 1? Is this persistent always? And what if I add 254 nodes, remove 5 then add another 5, does it remap the only spare ID's?

Thanks,

It looks like I've got the wrong module. I ordered from ebay about 3 months ago and the title said "CC1101 315/433/868/915Mhz Wireless Module SMA Antenna Transceiver fr Arduino New", but the description talks about a default "433 mhz". I'm not sure if it's switchable, but it doesn't seem to work. I've ordered another for the grand price of £1.95, but it'll take a month or so to get here. :(

Thanks. I'm using a different module, but the wiring looks the same. I'll try again later.

I didn't factory reset them. I'll try that.

OK, so I uncommented the settings in max.conf (I hadn't got to those) and I do get the following

But no pairing when I do 'families select 4' then 'pon' and try to pair. The device just times out and an 'ls' doesn't show any devices.

I may try a cleaner install and start again. I've been following a few posts and translating them into English, but it's still not working. It could, of course, be my hardware.

Is there a log output somewhere that shows the hardware initializing?

OK, so I've got my module, connected it to my Pi and installed homegear (used the Rasbian version with homegear and openhad installed). I connected to the Pi, ran homegear -r, families select 0, pairing on and started pairing on a device. However, I don't see anything in the peers list.

So, any ideas or obvious things I'm missing?

Excellent, thanks. Just what I need.

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,