Posts made by wint0178

OK, I'm not exactly sure what I did, but my student was able to edit the example sketch from MySensors V2 "GatewayESP8266MQTTClient" and add in code to send data from the Adafruit BME680 over MQTT. Once I added that code to my NodeMCU and added the # to the subscribe list in my gateway, it all just seemed to automatically add.

I should acknowledge that I had a misunderstanding about what physical components were nodes, sources, and fields. For some reason I thought that my NodeMCU was a gateway (this is true), it was also a node (this was not true), and that the BME680 was the source with several fields on it (TEMP, PRESS, HUMM). I believe I see now that the Node is actually the BME680 board and it has several separate sources, the physical sensors for each of the conditions it monitors and those numeric values, once acquired, become fields that the MC server can publish.

I am going to play some more with this since I would like to add all sorts of other nodes with a wide range of sources.

@jkandasa Yes, I am using MySensor V2.3.2 (I belive it is the lates reliece) and I have been able to get the MQTT gateways up and running. On the first one, it also automatically added it as a node, which seemed to be pretty great, but then the node would not mount again after I restarted the Gateway and once the GW was mounted into the dashboard. I'm not sure what was going on with that, but I have since connected the MQTT gateways through my DDNS and believe this will allow them to live anywhere they have internet. I'm not sure exactly what to do about the nodes since I have not been able to successfully add a node from either of my gateways.

I have finally been successful at getting the MC server running on a RPi (4, 8GB) at my house with port forwarding and DDNS to provide remote access.

The other day I was also able to get a NodeMCU 1.0 (ESP8266) board setup using MySensor example sketch "GatewayESP8266MQTTClient", which also automatically added a the board as a node to my resources.

Now, I am working on getting an actual sensor breakout board (source), Adafruit BME680 (temp, hum, press) wired to the NodeMCU gateway and sending sensor (field) data to my dashboard. My student was able to get one field sent, temperature, but we are not able to duplicate this with the other two field sources on the BME680. !

Here are some pictures of the settings that might help someone give us a direction to go.
This is the YAML view of the Source (BME680)

This is the YAML view of the Temp field that is working

This is the YAML view of the Hum fild that is not working

Thanks, in advance for any help you can provide. We will keep tinkering and reading about this, but we appreciate any insight you can provide.

I think I might have had a breakthrough. As I was working with the settings on the NodeMCU, MC Server web portal, and my internet router to setup the MQTT gateway, I turned on tcp port forwarding for 1883 to my RPi. As soon as I had done that, a node popped up under the Gateway and I was able to name the node "NodeMCU-1" it took a few minutes for the Gateway to show up too, but it did after a bit.

I'm curious if I need to use the added numbers and slashes for the topics to send and subscribe to. I notice that the serial output of my Arduino IDE while the board is still hooked up added some slashes and digits. Are those like an address for the specific data coming from that Gateway?

I have my MCv2 server running on a brand new RPi 4 (8GB with 32 GB microSD) it is running on the newest version of Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit with no problems. I am also using the free DDNS service provided from my internet router (Netgear) along with port forwarding of 8080 to the internal device IP address so that I can get access to the server from anywhere. I am wanting to get several MQTT gateways connected, but I'm not sure I understand how to get the MQTT broker linked with the gateways and MC Server. I am using MySensors and the example sketches they provide for NodeMCU 1.0 (ESP8266) in Arduino IDE. Do I need to setup another port to forward on my router? Any introductory information or advice that you can provide would be appreciated.

As always, I'll keep digging and fiddling with this. I'll add any updates as I have them.

@jkandasa I'm still not sure what happened. In the end, I decided to reformat the drive and start from scratch. I needed to write out some concise instructions for installing all of the software anyway and this was the right time to take care of that. Anyway, I have it installed again and running on the same drive with DDNS on my home router. I have port 8080 being forwarded to the http for my DDNS. I will monitor to see if something like this happens again, but this time I used the built-in SD Card Copier to make a copy of the drive after installing the server, maybe this will be a viable backup.

@wint0178 I'm not sure what's going on, but I decided to stop the docker apps and then restart the Pi, it is stuck on a black screen with a single horizontal text cursor blinking in the upper left corner. I removed the ssd and thought I would try to clone it onto a larger ssd, but when I looked at the drive there is plenty of space, well over 10 GB on the 32 GB drive. Yet, when I checked the drive in file manager it said there was no space. Additionally, I got a warning from Google drive on the web browser that some features were not available due to lack of memory AND from Arduino IDE when I tried to compile a sketch, it said there was no space. It seems as though there is a very small partition on the drive that is set too small, but file manager was able to view it as a 32 GB drive. Any ideas?

I am still hoping to simply clone to a 64 GB drive, but don't have the time before I leave for a family road trip.

I just got MC server running yesterday on a RPi 4 (4GB) with 32 GB drive. I'm not sure what settings could have caused this, but I've got to imagine I need to make some changes to the types of data that are stored or the frequency. Any insights would be appreciated. Thanks!

@jkandasa I just moved my RPi from work to home today after following your instructions to setup a network within docker that will runinfluxdb, natsio, and mqtt. When I came home and initially rebooted the machine, I was able to log into my server at http:<ip_address>:8080 without trouble. I later decided to simply shutdown the machine using the terminal "shutdown: command and restart it. When I logged back into my server dashboard I got the following error message:

Request failed with status code 401
URL: /api/version

Message: {"success":false,"message":"401 Unauthorized","data":null}

I'm not sure if this is related, but while I was initially running the machine, I plugged in an Ethernet cable and turned off WiFi for about two hours, then I decided to go back to WiFi, but the ip address was different between the two. I made the necessary changes in my Arduino sketch for the mqtt gateway and it worked, but the error message appeared. It may be nothing and may not cause any problems, or it may be due to the fact that I have no nodes or sensors actually hooked up yet, but I thought I'd add these details for you to take a look at.

@jkandasa do you expect this to change over time? Are you anticipating adding more features like v1.5 included to other users with various levels of access also?

@jkandasa Thank you for this reply, for now the port forwarding seems to be working, but this will give me other options to look into if this stops working for my implementation.

@jkandasa my labels are not changed from the default "location: server". Do you recommend making a change to those? I do not anticipate using more than one server. Also, I notice that the disabled line in gateway is followed by "false" should I change that to "true" to activate gateways or does that set this RPi up as a gateway?

I was able to get my DDNS service to work through my residential router and a service it provided. I have setup port forwarding for port 8080 and am able to see my dashboard on my mobile device.

I am curious if the same will be needed for the MQTT nodes/gateways that will be setup at remote locations. Will I need to setup some port forwarding for those too?

I noticed that there is a place in the MySensor Gateway sketch that uses a url rather than an IP address and I assume I will simply use the DDNS username in the complete url with port number to link my gateways to my MQTT broker running in docker on the same RPi as my MC Server.

My understanding is that I will be able to get my MC server setup to see it from any computer with a web browser. Is that correct? If so, how do I access the dashboard remotely to view the data?

I think I could use my IP address on port 8080 or 8443(secure), but my understanding of residential internet is that my internal IP is certainly not the same as my external IP address. How do I navigate to my server to view the dashboard from a machine somewhere else?

I plan to look into DDNS, but would love to hear from others if this is the best way to do this?

@jkandasa thanks for the help, I think the errors are gone now. I was able to move my RPi home and the MC server started up after booting the OS just like normal. This is wonderful!

As for the errors, perhaps they will reappear at work? Or maybe they are gone, not sure, but I will comment again later if they reappear.

As for the dashboard, there is nothing there. In v1.5 there was a clock and location, but not in v2.0. Is here a way to add those back?

This question demonstrated just how much I don't know, but I am not able to get a gateway setup for MC Server on RPi. I don't think I even understand the basics, but I will explain what I have tried and see if it makes sense.

I have installed Arduino IDE on my pi and have added the MySensor library. Then, I opened the GatewaySerial example and looked it over. I prefer to use 115200 baud so I changed that, but otherwise made no changes and compiled the sketch to my Arduino nano. The serial output is as follows:

0;255;3;0;9;0 MCO:BGN:INIT GW,CP=RNNGA---,FQ=16,REL=255,VER=2.3.2
0;255;3;0;9;5 TSM:INIT
0;255;3;0;9;7 TSF:WUR:MS=0
0;255;3;0;9;15 TSM:INIT:TSP OK
0;255;3;0;9;18 TSM:INIT:GW MODE
0;255;3;0;9;21 TSM:READY:ID=0,PAR=0,DIS=0
0;255;3;0;9;24 MCO:REG:NOT NEEDED
0;255;3;0;14;Gateway startup complete.
0;255;0;0;18;2.3.2
0;255;3;0;9;28 MCO:BGN:STP
0;255;3;0;9;35 MCO:BGN:INIT OK,TSP=1
0;255;3;0;9;38 TSM:READY:NWD REQ
0;255;3;0;9;45 ?TSF:MSG:SEND,0-0-255-255,s=255,c=3,t=20,pt=0,l=0,sg=0,ft=0,st=OK:

This leads me to believe that Arduino IDE believes the gateway is working.

At that point, I go over to MyController on the same machine and attempt to add a serial gateway. I have named it "Serial02" simply because it is the second attempt.
Description - empty
it is enabled
reconnect delay is 30s
Queue Failed Messages is off
Labels, if I understand them, are used to help organize my devices so I have named the room under key "analytical" and the Value refers to the server "pi1". I'd guess these might need to be changed, but I don't know what makes sense for them even after looking over the documentation on the power of labels.
Type is set to MySensor V2
Internal Message Ack is off
Stream Message Ack is off
Retry count is 3
Timeout is 500 ms
Protocal Type is Serial
Transmit Pre Delay is 10 ms
Port Name, which is confirmed in terminal and Arduino IDE is /dev/ttyUSB0
baud rate is 115200, which matches the arduino sketch
and message logger is set to none.

Please help me figure this out, I'm not sure what questions to even ask at this point. I'll keep working on it, but any insights would be greatly appreciated.

@jkandasa this appears to have worked, but I am at work right now and will not have a chance to check at home until later today. I have influxdb, natsio, and mqtt all running in docker AND I have the network setup the way you described. Thank you for all of the help!

Once I started MC on my Pi the dashboard comes up, but I get the following message (or error) in the upper right corner:

Request failed with status code 401
URL: /api/datarepository

Message: {"success":false,"message":"401 Unauthorized","data":null}

Any idea what this is about? I am currently working on getting MySensor Gateways, nodes, and sensors hooked up, but have not made it very far into the process.

Out of curiosity, what would it take to move MC v2 server running on RPi with docker, influxdb, nats.io and mqtt broker from work to home where it would have a different IP address? I would like to be able to do this while I'm working on it, but have already tried to do it by chaging the IP addresses for nats.io and MQTT in the mycontroller.yaml file along with a full restart to follow. That didn't work and gave a message that the container already existed so would need to be renamed or removed. I tried the $ docker -rm and $ docker rename, both seemed to work, but that didn't help.

Ultimately, It looks like that nats.io and mqtt are what is running and causing the problem since I ran $ docker ps and got the following:
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
4198c1f43976 eclipse-mosquitto:1.6.9 "/docker-entrypoint.…" 4 hours ago Up 12 minutes 0.0.0.0:1883->1883/tcp, :::1883->1883/tcp, 0.0.0.0:9001->9001/tcp, :::9001->9001/tcp mc_mosquitto
b1a6893aebf1 nats:2.2.2-alpine "docker-entrypoint.s…" 4 hours ago Up 13 minutes 6222/tcp, 0.0.0.0:4222->4222/tcp, :::4222->4222/tcp, 8222/tcp mc_natsio

I've tried going through the documentation and simply restarting each of the services, maybe that was a mistake?

I'll keep trying, but would love input about how to make this server portable so I can move it back and forth daily for now.

@wint0178 I see the notes on the "Installation" page of the documentation that the MongoDB, MQTT broker and nasts.io are optional, but how would I determine if I need them or should install them?

I am setting up the MC v2 on my RPi-4 with 4GB memory. I am hoping to add multiple gateways each with several MySensors boards connected to each gateway. It is not clear to me whether I need to have all of the dependant software installed or not. For example, do I need to have NATS.io installed for this? If so, should it be installed in my host or in docker?

I have the same questions for influxdb and MQTT broker. How do I know which ones I need and whether they should be installed in the host system or in docker?