FINALLY! after a journey of almost 2 years, the official MySensors Sensebender Gateway (discussed over here) is now entering pre-sales at our parther itead.cc, with an expected shipment date of around 21st of January.

I know this has been a bit longer than first anticipated, but I hope that you all will bear with me on this one, as my daytime job has taken too much control over my life the past year.

The plan is that it will be released with the latest firmware (we have release 2.1 coming up one of the next days). It will be built for NRF24 radios, without signing. But you can all change this by uploading a new firmware with arduino.

Please head over to https://www.itead.cc/mysensors-gateway.html if you are interested in buying this board, or read the discussions on the openhardware project page https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/2761/mysensors-gateway

(By buying this board, you will also support the mysensors community, as we will receive a small commission of the sales from itead)

An almost complete rewrite of the node-red-contrib-mysensors has been released.

What have been done this time is:

• Rewritten in typescript
• a controller node is added, allowing node-red to hand out node id's to a mysensors network.

The move to typescript should enable more test of the software, as I now have a compile time check, and also implemented the first unit tests of the code.

Please note that the mysencdec node has now been removed.. If you still use it, then you should remove it before upgrading the package, or node-red might stop the flows, as it is missing nodes.

Please use the issue tracker on github, if you find some undocumented "features"

It's been a while since my latest update, but I am moving closer to production of this gateway.

I have received the first production samples from Itead

I have done hardware verification of the board. Everything seems to be ok, so we are very near the goal.

I can't say anything about pricing yet, as Itead haven't given us a price yet. But I hope that we will be able to announce that very soon (tm)

Finally a picture with all the connectors added as well

Not working on hardware at the moment, but I am still "building" things with mysensors.. Recently I have been moving all my homeautomation to docker containers, and also moving stuff towards using MQTT as a backbone transport.

Right now I have moved automation rules from domoticz to nodered, after which I have "killed" domoticz (the only reason why I had been keeping it alive, was because it handled some of my automation rules for turning tv / amplifier on when chromecast was active etc).

Together with my chromecast "surveilance python service" I get notifications on MQTT when any of my two chromecasts starts an app / pause/ play etc. The python program also has a MQTT listener, so I can send pause/play etc. to my chromecasts over mqtt. And even throw a stream to it over mqtt.

Today I made a universal control endpoint, so I can send pause/play etc. to a single mqtt topic, and then nodered directs it to the active chromecast, or to my dvd player if that is the active in the current scene.

In the end everything should play together with a dashboard that I have made in angular5 (rewriting it at the moment to use MQTT instead of various http calls)

The plan is that the dashboard is on a wallmounted tablet, acting as a simple dashboard / weather station, where one can control basic things in the livingroom (start streaming of specific Radio / TV channels among other things).

The nodered project can be found here, if anyone would like to have a look..

And now we are online in the Arduino Library manager..

So people can "easily" update to the latest and greatest MySensors release..

And ethernet is up!

I think this calls for a couple of pictures of the "thing"

first with ethernet / usb (power) connected.

and without ethernet shield

Not at all mysensors related, but I have been busy building a bartop mame cabinet the last week or so.. Still mis a couple of details, but it is in a "playable" state right now.

The setup is using an old 19" lcd monitor that I had in surplus with a RPI-3B on the back, a couple of cheap Chinese arcade controllers, a partly homebuild audio hat for the rpi (adafruit i2s 3W amplifiers), and a switchmode capable of 5V @8A (if I remember right), and 12V @3A. So I have power for the marque lighting as well..

Only game available right now is Bubble Bobble, and the kids loves it (as seen in the video linked to below).

Retro arcade first game – 00:29
— Thomas Bowman Mørch

Even though I have been around Mysensors for quite some time now, I have mainly used it as a means of collecting environmental data from the house / outside.

But finally I have come to the point that I am beginning to get a bit of LED lights implemented as well, with control from domoticz. First one was behind my TV, been running for awhile now, turning on a backlight after sunset. It even dims up/down upon activity from our chromecast

The latest addition is a shelf behind the couch, with built in LED lights, with touch based interaction. Made up of an mpr121 breakout board, an arduino with nrf24 radio, and a couple of FETs.

a video of the thing in operation is on youtube (And yes, it's recorded today, the kids are having fun with some youtube music channels on the tv with Christmas songs..)

It's all tied in to domoticz, so I can make the same light settings behind the couch, as behind the TV.

some pictures from the build process:

@Peter-Loeffler

I'm not sure how to address your statement. But beeing one of the core group members myself, I feel that it's a bit harsh. We all have a life, and fulltime job, besides mysensors! This means that we can't spend every minute of our (spare) time on mysensors all the time. Some of us have scaled down on activities for a period, due to children, work, house renovations etc.

Maybe we (the core group) say no to some new features in the project, but that is because we are uncertain about the following support / bugfixing of that particular feature. Specially in the light of the above, with limited spare time for the projects.

For my part, I've had a couple of rough years, that took the steam out of my envolvement in a lot of projects, including MySensors. But I'm slowly re-emerging from the deep dark now. So I hope that I get more time to do new fun sensors / hardware again. But things take time, and do not want to rush things, that could send me back into the dark again.

So almost finished the first two boards of the new revision..

I changed the footprint of all the SMD capacitors, and resistors, to footprints recomended by the manufacturer we are in dialog with for the mass production. Only problem is, that it's a nightmare soldering the 0402 smd components now, because the footprints are much smaller than what was used on the first revision.

Anyway, only missing decoupling capacitors now, so I'm going to power it up, just to see if everything works like it should.

The two first is also with atsha204 mounted! Hope that everything is connected as it should be

First powerup seems to be ok. no excessive power ussage, and bootloader is successfully dumped into the first board. So it seems like a success sofar. (Even LED lights up during bootloader startup.. So that's also a success :))

Also ATSHA204 is confirmed working on the first prototype!

@Yoshu you could boot linux off a usb, and check there..

@Yoshu Does the same device work on another machine, running win10 / linux?

Unfortunately I do not have any hardware compatible with win11, so can't test myself.. But if I remember right it should turn up as a generic cdc device..

Is there any info in the windows device manager?

@TheoL said in Merry X-mas:

Hey all,

I wanna wish you all the best X-mas - I know it's a little but early - and I wish you all some awesome projects in 2022. I hope we can get a creative spirit in 2022 and create cool things together.

Merry x-mas, and (an early) happy new year to you too

@keithellis
They should be available here https://itead.cc/product/mysensors-micro/

@monte said in Best PC platform for running Esxi/Docker at home?:

@tbowmo I don't know your setup, but optimizing the code that serves frames to the detector can help more then you may think.

I'm using zoneminder, and zmeventserver for this.. All running in docker at the moment.. Haven't had the time for digging in to this machine learning, other than scratch the surface, and trying to apply prior work to my own setup..

@monte currently I'm at the order of 0.2fps, would be nice with a bit more throughput, as I'm planning for more cameras along the way. (currently I have 2 cameras running 24/7,but have 2 more that I just need to put up..)

@NeverDie i prefer to keep video footage local. Not saying that I need an rtx3080/3090. They're too pricey. Looking more towards 1050ti or the like. Should be enough, if I'm not going for coral tpu. Waiting for a friend to get hold on some tpus, and give his verdict.

I've been looking at building a new server myself.. Currently I have an old hp desktop machine with an I5 / 16Gb of ram, running as server.. Works fine (and it was cheap). But I want to play more with docker / kubernetes, and perhaps do some more machinelearning on zoneminder images, so could use a cpu with a bit more oompf.. Perhaps an nvidia gfx for the ML part..

Only problem is that I'm not ready to spend 1000$ or more on hardware, so I'll probably just wait for the prices to drop again..

(Currently I just run ubuntu server, and then docker on top of that.. No VMs or the like..)

Perhaps my definition about "controller", is a bit broad here.

What could be done, is to have a thin "controller", that receives MQTT from the existing gateway, hands out IDs if they are requested from a new node, and translate the message into homie compliant topics. That is all it has to do, should not care about the rest of the automation at all. Should also be able to translate back from homie compliant to mysensors.

This could be written in python, c#, javascript, rust etc. The benefit is that you have (relatively) easy editing of configurations at hands, without re-uploading sketches to your gateways / nodes, if you decide that node X should be named Y instead.

And I am in no way trying to treat anyone as a fool!