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).

https://youtu.be/h_6FebqefcQ

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!

We are happy to announce that we now have made it possible to use "arduino board manager" to download board packages for MySensors specific boards.

Currently this comprises of SenseBender micro, and the upcomming gateway device, and you can find the board packages at https://github.com/mysensors/ArduinoBoards.

This is mostly for persons using development branch (2.0.0) as the hardware definitions are now moved from that branch, and separated into it's own git repositories.

@sundberg84 you could have all the rpi's running on the pc hardware, and save a couple of pennies on the electricity bill..

I exchanged my HA rpi with an atom based machine, as it had 4Gb ram. Now I'm using docker to containerize the different parts of my setup (influxdb, grafana, domoticz, nodered, moquitto, etc.). Ok, it uses a bit more power, but not that much compared to the flexibility that I have now. So now I have a lot of "machines" for handling the different parts.. I can even spin up an experimental domoticz in seconds (I'm playing with mqtt for backbone in my HA setup, instead of mysensors serial protocol, and a lot of http calls to different parts of my system.

We now have a small video collage up on youtube from the faire.

https://youtu.be/grupCwebrVM

Received a new prototype from dirtypcbs the other day

I have only come to the point where the SD Card reader is mounted, as I wanted to try the mechanics out :)

Currently I'm lacking time for finishing it within the next 2-3 weeks.. If someone knows how to slow down time around you, without being slowed down yourself, please tell me how to achieve it :) (Too many high priority tasks at the moment..)

things are beginning to take form..

First arduino sketch are running on the GW

Proof is here :)

just grabbed a quick image of the secret den here :)

and yes, it does need a bit of cleanup, so I have a space for my laptop there, but I have a couple of other higher priority projects.. So cleaning must come later (at least I have space for building pcb's whenever I have time for it..).

The following tools are in use:

• Weller dual digital soldering station
• Old digital multimeter (had it for 15+ years)
• Tektronix 60Mhz oscilloscope
• 30V/5A power supply
• Homemade vices for holding pcb's.

A small Christmas progress update.

I got external eeprom, and w5100 module running now.

That means I have a working ethernet GW running with nrf24 running on SAMD.

I'm waiting for rfm69 modules from China before I can verify that this part also works as expected.

An ethernet GW with hw signing is using 35.988 bytes, or 13% of the available flash size, which is 256kbyte. So we have "plenty" of room to do other fun stuff on the GW

and of course a small video of the in action

https://youtu.be/ABd86RK-Z4E

Just made a fun (and useful) sensor / device, using a arduino pro-micro (atmega32u4), and VL53L01 TOF distance sensor.

It's an auto lock device for my pc, I have mounted the VL53L01 to the bottom of my center monitor, and then have it measure the distance to my body, whenever it exceeds 1m (or is out of range), I increase a counter. When the counter reaches 20 (seconds) I send keypress GUI+L, to lock the screen (works equally well on ubuntu and windows).

When I return to the desk again, it is detected by the arduino (distance is now under 1m again). And it then sends CTRL+ALT+DEL to start login procedure.

The arduino sketch is available on https://gist.github.com/tbowmo/7e9934796d47566dc09e7b3bc5b2f208

next project should probably be to find a better enclosure, and build one for when I return to the office in a month or two, when the corona lockdown is lifted more

@alexsh1

we have looked at a couple of other manufacturers in China / Hong Kong area.. But found (back then) that Itead was the best solution, as they would handle manufacturing, stock, and shipment for us, and pay us a commission of the sale which makes it extremely easy for us to handle product launches

With the other manufacturers we had to buy 100/200 units, and handle stock / shipment ourselves, and with the limited time for the project (as most of us have families and daytime jobs to take care of, besides of bringing new products into the world), this is not a feasible solution..

My contact person at Itead, promised that she would get the quotation guy to answer me today. So let's see what happens