Tomas McGuinness

Found this really good PDF on optimizing the nRF for long battery life in Matter devices. It includes a good explanation of Intermittent connected devices docs-be.nordicsemi.com/bundle/nwp_0...

Zigbee – Running Dual Temperature sensor on a ProMicro nRF52840 I got back from my holidays today and found that my order of Promicro nRF52840 boards from Aliexpress had arrived! I was trying out these Promicro boards because the battery terminals are available via the header pins. The XIAO boards I was orignally hoping to use worked great, but the +/- battery terminals were underneath. I had a real go at…

In this post I tried to get my Zigbee sensor running on a new Pro Micro nRF52840 board, but had to admit defeat!

I think we have spuds!

An alternative route would be to use Matter. This would avoid the Zigbee issue and allow me to use v3 of Nordic SDK.

I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t try an ESP32 board for this. I really just wanted ten sensors up and running before Christmas. Perhaps my goal of designing my own PCB for this was too lofty??

Managed to flash some code onto these boards, but ended up needing my J-LINK. Turns out that I can’t use these boards with Nordic Connect. What a bloody mess.

This got delivered today. It’s an ESP32 with POE support. Big bigger than I expected, but compact for what it is. I’m hoping the ESP Matter SDK will run on this.

The alternative nRF52840 boards I ordered arrived whilst I was on holidays. Not as big as I thought they would be. Will try them out this week and fingers crossed they’ll serve as a viable replacement for the XIAO boards. The battery terminals are on the header pins, so I can socket mount these.

Stupid is as stupid does. “Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.”

The discovery aspect of my posts is something I’ve been trying. They aren’t the easiest to follow as I write them as I go as I go alone.

I can’t remember what level of detail I go into.

Depends. What are you trying to do? I would recommend Influx DB for better logging and interrogation/display.

YouTube video by Tomas McGuinness Introducing and connecting my heat meter to Home Assistant

Mind you, I think I’ve done that. Introducing and connecting my heat meter to Home Assistant
youtu.be/0JyeLY9NURg

I’ve written a Python script that reads my heat meter via ModBus (over USB) and then publishes the readings via MQTT. I wonder if that would be a helpful YouTube video?

For MQTT, it’s straightforward. The payload will be JSON (probably) and you tell HA how to read it. You shouldn’t need SQL for anything in HA.

🤣 I know the feeling.

ESP32-POE - Open Source Hardware Board ESP32-POE IoT development board with 100Mb Ethernet, Power over Ethernet, WiFi, BLE, programmer

Ah, I see. The MQTT support is integrated. I figured it was just ModBus over TCP.

I found this little hoard: www.olimex.com/Products/IoT...

And also this thepihut.com/products/ard...

You’ll need something to convert the ModBus into MQTT. I have used a standalone raspberry pi with a python script. I’d like to do a way with that and use something else. That DIN rail unit would replace the pi and the RS485 to USB converter.

Tell you what, £23 is cheap. The PoE support is amazing. Something like that would remove the need for a standalone controller. My controller could read the values directly….hmmmm

ModBus over TCP by the looks of it. You’ll need another box to act as the controller. That little gizmo looks interesting! If that’s going into a consumer unit, you do need special Ethernet cable I think.

The baud I tested with is 9600. It might go faster. Not sure faster than once a second is useful though. Once I add the Matter code, I’ll have a better idea. Matter might be limited in how fast it can report,

I’m doing the same with my heat meter, an RPi sling under it with a python script reading the values and pushing to MQTT.

The sample code I’m using is reading once a second.

In this post I look at connecting an ESP32 to an SDM120M energy meter to read its values via Modbus.

Endianness is the bane of my life with low level programming! It’s amazing how much is just hidden under the surface with higher order languages. I’m glad I started my career with C programming. I think it’s given me a broader understanding.

I dropped an f-bomb in the first 30 seconds of one of my videos. Was eligible for monetisation. Didn’t think 7 seconds was a thing. Thanks!

😂 I love hardware.

That’s true of all developers.

🙋 does anyone know about any interesting full-stack/frontend roles, which ideally would benefit from significant nuxt expertise?

asking on behalf of a very talented developer ...

Fuck my life. These idiots walk amongst us.

Hopefully it won’t be a 100 years before I retire 😂😂😂