Best posts made by waspie

A temperature sensor in my boys' room went missing this morning when my wife gathered up the bed sheets to launder. I hadn't printed a case for it and mounted it anywhere and had it on the bed out of the way. It should have been hard to get tangled up in the sheets.
I noticed it was missing from its perch and was looking around for it but not too hard as I was working.
And hour or so later I walked passed one of the panels in the house that displays information and noticed the temperature for that room had increased to over 100 Fahrenheit which immediately confirmed my suspicion about where it went.

It went through the wash cycle and on to dry (combination machine) and survived the whole thing

Some pictures of an assembled unit with 3d printed case

@ncollins

throw this somewhere in your code:

void reboot() {
  wdt_disable();
  wdt_enable(WDTO_15MS);
  while (1) {}
}

and then calling the reboot (in the entire loop):

void loop() {

  if (motion_change) {
    motionDetected=!motionDetected;
    if (motionDetected) {
      send(msg.set("1"));  // motion detected
    }
    else {
      digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN,LOW);  //turn-off LED to signify motion no longer detected
      send(msg.set("0"));  // send all-clear to prepare for future detections
    }    
    
    NRF_LPCOMP->EVENTS_CROSS=0;
    motion_change=false;
  }
  else { //must be a scheduled wake-up.  Time to report voltage as a heartbeat.
    batteryVoltage=((float)hwCPUVoltage())/1000.0;  //take voltage measurement after transmission to hopefully measure lowest voltage that occurs. 
    send(msg_S_MULTIMETER_V_VOLTAGE.set(batteryVoltage,3));  //send battery voltage with 3 decimal places
    time = millis();
    if (time > 14400000 ) {
      reboot();
    }
  }
  mySleep(1200000);  //sleep for 20 minutes
}```

I had seemingly unending problems getting sensors to be reliable and about gave up until i switched to ebyte modules.

Since redesigning boards to use their slightly different pinout and moving to their modules I haven't had any issues. A complete turnaround from what i was experiencing before - highly recommended.

@Yveaux this has resolved it, thank you

try another radio? My gateway is a Pi Zero W and works fine so there's no reason it shouldn't work for you.

Did anyone ever find a PIR sensor that could handle voltages below 2.8v without going wonky?

I use CR123a batteries with my PIR and I recently had to replace one. It was at the moment I realized I had at least of year of life out of this one and it had only then dropped to 60%.

If there was another sensor readily and cheaply available it could be of some interest although I'm pretty content with a year of life.

@scalz
Thanks for the link to the 3.3v USBASP mod!
i have been pulling my hair out trying to get bare 328p chips programmed using a generic ASP

thank you!!!

my pi3b does this as well. it's far and few in between. I even made a watchdog in openhab to "ping" the msgw (requesting an ack) and mysgw responds but it doesn't send out new sensor readings. i thought about expanding the watchdog to watch for all sensor readings and throw up a restart to the gw if it receives no readings in a 10 minute period but mine doesn't fail nearly as consistently as yours so I haven't worried about it too much...

would still like to see a resolution to this as I've moved most of my PIRs and temp sensors to mysgw so when it goes down it can be a bit of a problem.

@mfalkvidd said in AM612 PIR can:

BL412 (the adafruit link) is rated for 2.7V minimum.

However, the BS412 is rated for 2.0V minimum. Maybe that's a good candidate?

nice find!
and 11ua, a little lower than the 612. Might have to try one of these some day

@chey I really never did much looking around. As I said, it wasn't really much of an issue. The first PIRs I built are having their batteries die just now. I started down this road with the PIRs about 2 years ago - so that's about how long they've been lasting as-is.

This one in particular for my SMD needs
http://www.ebyte.com/en/product-view-news.aspx?id=111

I haven't used any of the larger, non-SMD versions but i would expect to have similar success.

I had 2 or 3 different SMD versions from no-name vendors (not blobs, at least) that had various issues communicating. These issues included not communicating at all to garbled characters and loads of NACKS.

The pinout is slightly different so I had to make a small change to my board design but other than that everything else was the same. The ebyte modules have (for me) worked first time, every time.

thanks, i've been fighting with this (i think) in a 51822. I was reviving getting these working and i keep chewing through batteries.

@ncollins good news

I wonder if this has anything to do with it?
https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/10705/nrf52-watchdog-problem-myboardnrf5

I also had a lot of problems before finally switching to (cd)ebyte modules. After moving to ebyte modules for the gateway and nodes my problems have all but vanished. good luck.

@ncollins thanks bud!

with the htu21 the sleeping consumption is sub 5ua. its been 4 days and hovering around 3 volts. i'm keeping my fingers crossed. Would love to reliably use these. Since I had so much trouble with them I designed and put into use atmega328p boards quite a while ago now so I'm happy with those but I still had a crap ton of these nrf51 and nrf52 boards made thinking i would get a lot of use out of them.

Things are improving. With some of the more recent developments and the reboot strategy I at least have reliable motion sensors working now. They've been up for about 2 months now, huge improvement!

irq=18 worked for me for anyone who comes along wondering

@haasje30 if it's mqtt both can subscribe at the same time

@ncollins
yep!
while its only a few days I'm not seeing those dips that you can notice prior to the big drop. might be nothing, might be something. who know!

It's looking more and more like the code is fine and its the sensors i'm using that are the problem.

I got some BM612 (cheaper) from ali supposedly the same as am612 but they don't seem to work right. It's like they trigger once and then never again. Can't find a data sheet for them...

I hooked up a 312 just for kicks and it seems to be working. I doubt I'll deploy any 312s due to what seems to be a VERY narrow range and plus it doesn't match the profile of the round board etc...

Anyway, wanted to say that i think this is all working as its supposed to I just got a bad batch of sensors or they're slightly different in some way

@Omemanti
If you're experiencing this issue I'd certainly try 1. I don't know that I'd got hog wild just yet unless they're easy to get to and easy to hook up.

For anyone looking to use @NeverDie 's nrf51 circular board (v9) with this breakout - I'm using the sketch as linked from @Nca78 in this post: https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/6961/nrf5-action/1542
in conjunction with the edit to the file as described in this post:
https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/6961/nrf5-action/1514 (the edit to WInterrupt.c and I'm using version 0.6.0 from sandeep)

with just a few minor edits to the sketch from Nca (setting the pin to 10 (sda marked on the circular board).

14ua idle current btw, working like a charm. so far i'm just using a 2032. Trying to figure out a way to strap a cr2450 or 2477 on the back

for what its worth IIRC i'm getting at least 6 months on the ol' 612 with a CR2450.
Close to two years on a CR123a. So yeah, if I made more I'd design a new board for the new PIR sensors you're finding out there but the 612 even with its higher dropout voltage seems to work fine with even a moderatly sized battery.

@NeverDie said in AM612 Passive Infrared Sensor Breakout Board:

@waspie said in AM612 Passive Infrared Sensor Breakout Board:

for what its worth IIRC i'm getting at least 6 months on the ol' 612 with a CR2450.
Close to two years on a CR123a. So yeah, if I made more I'd design a new board for the new PIR sensors you're finding out there but the 612 even with its higher dropout voltage seems to work fine with even a moderatly sized battery.

Unless the actual current drain is larger than the 14ua I'm assuming, it sounds as though the other drains on your battery are what's dominating. So, if my calculations are right, you likely wouldn't get more than a small percentage more battery life out of using the 3ua sensor instead of the AM612.

I'm using mostly 328p with edbyte radios with a resting current (no PIR) of like lets say 5-7ua? I haven't tested it in forever. with 2 years of battery on a 123 it just didnt seem worth the trouble worrying about any of it. and thanks for your designs that got me off the ground with that stuff btw.

after the fix for the 51822 and 832 i put together a few of those and those are using the cr2450. i think those rest at like 4.5ua (minus the pir of course). 6+ months on a button cell is quite all right with me.