Best posts made by wassfila

Re: nRF5 action!
@janaka_a
@NeverDie
@ncollins
I thought you might be interested about this. I've been recently working on this project, the PCB design was made by another Team member and I worked on the firmware, it's based on Zephyr and running multiple protocols. This was mainly designed for Thread using the openthread stack. The nice thing is that once openthread is up and running you simply get a udp socket on which it's possible to send json that directly talks to an application. Despite the standard networking stack, this Tag has astonishing low power with sleep current of only 3.19 uA. I also tried some experimental custom radio protocols on it like the simple mesh, so if anyone is interested to have MySensors running on it I'd be happy to help.

Project page :
https://www.homesmartmesh.com/docs/microcontrollers/nrf52/thread_sensortag/

PCB :
https://github.com/HomeSmartMesh/nrf52_thread_sensortag

Zephyr firmware :
https://github.com/HomeSmartMesh/sdk-hsm-sensortag

The MQTT gateway consists of few lines of python :
https://github.com/HomeSmartMesh/raspi/blob/master/py/thread_tags/thread_tags.py

components :
nRF52840 on a MS88SF2 module.
i²C bus scl P1.13 and sda P1.15
Light sensor VEMLS6030 @0x48
MS8607 with relative humidity @0x40, pressure and temperature @0x76
Reset button P0.18 and user button SW0 P1.09
RGB LED P0. 04 06 08

@NeverDie , indeed OTA is optimal, then at least the default pre-flashed bootloaded is not so bad to be able to update SW without debugger. But for development purposes the USB dongles are much cheaper than the devkit, yet lacking debug connections. I hope this pogo pin adapter can help others, as I use it to flash and even debug with Ozone on that cheap nRF52840 USB dongle.
Link to CAD Model : https://a360.co/3jr91PD
Also on thingiverse although thingiverse connection is not stable
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3384693

I also like platformio Arduino and would like to have the nRF52840 USB dongle supported without the softdevices, as they prevent the direct usage of the RF peripheral for custom radio.

Hi @robertjuric ,
as you're particularly interested in MQTT for logging through influx and grafana, that is exactly what I've been doing so this might be of help.
https://hackaday.io/project/20388-home-smart-mesh
My project did not exactly use MySensors, but I'm interested to get MySensors to work on the rest of my raspberry py, database and dashboard environment.
The raspberry pi has a python script running an influx client here : https://github.com/nRFMesh/nRF52_Mesh/tree/master/raspi/influx
That client collects MQTT topics and forward them to the database.
some example dashboards are shared here that show how influx queries are written in grafana, also to make hour averages: https://github.com/nRFMesh/nRF52_Mesh/tree/master/raspi/grafana

I do recommend keeping as many things running on the raspberry pi as possible, e.g. MQTT broquer, scripts, services, as linux is an advanced operating system that makes logging and debugging of errors much easier than running on a microcontroller.

I'm not sure how much what I shared is relevant to you, but in case you're interested or have questions, just let me know.

@projectMarvin
As you're really interested in Nordic nRF52840 and nRF52832, I can't prevent myself from suggesting you to have a look at this project where I used a mesh of low power sensors with two types of dongles UART and native USB.
https://github.com/nRFMesh/nRF52_Mesh

I do not place this project as alternative to MySensors as it does not have the same goal at all (no community, not many sensors), it's very custom, but the advantage is flexibility in case someone wants to be closer to the official nRF SDK, as that's my sole dependency and it is not using softdevices so leaves freedom to use priviledges and inetrrupts as needed.
I've been actively looking for standardised method to fulfill low power sensors, mesh network with OTA update. And the way there seems clear but very slow. only nRF52840 supports zigbee, and you need a custom zigbee to MQTT for each network. I have hopes that Thread (OpenThread) will resolve this, but thread is too experimental at the moment and 0 commercial sensors compare to all zigbee sensors available on the market.
So I guess, the radio choice for you will depend if you target a commercially supported project which has a development budget or a DIY plan, also how much effort is intended to be spent on custom sensors creation compared to using low cost existing ones. I realised that I can't make DIY sensors cheaper than the existing zigbee one, which breakes the goal of the DIY model unless you do it for learning purpose or for fun.
I'm checked the micro python / circuit python, but that's also a slow evolving path where it's not the HW supplier that's worried about porting the drivers but a third party have them limited to some peripherals.
Nordic has OTA examples since the very first SDK of nRF5xxx, but it's way challenging to bring it to a seemless user product, just configuring nRF compile flags is quite complicated.
I'll keep watching this forum closely and be happ to see a working solution with nRF52xxx, I do have x5 of those nRF52840 usb dongles.

@projectMarvin here's the next gen project that is actually a HW sensorTag but also mainly an nRF52840 firmware compatible with openthread and my previous gen simple mesh framework. The openthread is quite simple as you no longer have to worry about app layer when using directly json from the uC
https://www.homesmartmesh.com/docs/microcontrollers/nrf52/thread_sensortag/