Fewer home automation postings? What's behind it?

[linuxha]

Hi Linuxha,
 
I think I'm on a similar trajectory to you.  For powered sensors, I'm leveraging the Wemos D1 Mini ESP8266, but for battery/solar powered sensors, I'm switching everything over to the Nordic nRF52832, which fits a 32-bit ARM MCU, wireless radio, and RTC into a tiny package that doesn't draw much sleep current (about 2ua with RTC running):

On the agenda soon is to get Node Red with MQTT running.  Not sure where to begin with that though.  What do you suggest?

Shiny! I found that they have an Arduino core that board. Not sure it's appropriate but I like to check my options. I have mixed feelings about the Arduino env. Love it for getting things done quickly. Hate it for everything else.
 
Not sure what env. you'll be working with. Are you running this on a Pi or an x86 box? Linux, Windows, Mac?
 
On my local x86-64 Linux box I've done a custom node-red install (from git). I've also installed MQTT from git. I wanted some bleeding edge features (at the time - ssl web sockets) and the Debian pkgs lagged quite a bit. On the Pis I've used the default pkg (raspbian). I have quite the mix with x86 MQTT to Pi MQTT and both to adafruit.io MQTT. I haven't worked with login to the MQTT yet. I managed to confuse myself pretty good there. Need to retry that.
 
On the node-red, I install a lot of the stuff local to my user node-red (user pi on the pi, my user on the x86). So most packages are local to the user though I could install global also. I haven't secured the node-red editor yet. I'll have to try that again.
 
Node-Red is another love/hate relationship (more love than hate). Async programming (event driven) is a different way of thinking. Debugging is basiclly back to printfs. Version Control is a pain. Create new virtual devices is a breeze. I just wrote my first module and other than debug it wasn't hard. Synchronizing events is a pain. Used with MQTT you can do some really interesting things. I have a lot of scripts in cron and I've had very little trouble integrating that data into Node-Red with MQTT. And MQTT makes it easy to share data across HA suites.

 

[NeverDie]

Yes, I'm using the Arduino environment to program it (https://github.com/sandeepmistry/arduino-nRF5), because it was faster to get up and running with that.  I'm not using the bluetooth stack, but instead using its proprietary modes (similar to an nRF24L01) because, again, it's faster to get it up and running that way.
 
This has some good information for getting started with it:  https://www.openhardware.io/view/376/MySensors-NRF5-Platform

 

[linuxha]

Yes, I'm using the Arduino environment to program it (https://github.com/sandeepmistry/arduino-nRF5), because it was faster to get up and running with that.  I'm not using the bluetooth stack, but instead using its proprietary modes (similar to an nRF24L01) because, again, it's faster to get it up and running that way.
 
This has some good information for getting started with it:  https://www.openhardware.io/view/376/MySensors-NRF5-Platform

Thanks  for the information, much appreciated. I don't have any immediate nrF-5  projects with this board as I'm using the WiFi at home. But I'm sure I can find a need ( ;-) ) in the future.