Two motion sensors v2 are in use right now, yippee!

I upgraded an existing v1 sensor to a v2 and built a new one. The v2 sensor specs are very different from the v1 but much more promising, yet all i needed to do to was soldering the digital output of the PIR to another JeeNode port (namely ATmega INT1) and use a different digital port for serial I/O with the XBee. Oh, and upload a new sketch of course. Now i have 2 identical v2 sensors:

v1 upgraded to v2

Looking back at how this motion sensor evolved i am wondering, why didn’t i think of interrupts in the first place… not very smart actually..

Or maybe i did think about interrupts but unconsciously thought it would be to hard for me to handle already, cause that’s what you read all the time: interrupts are a tough subject! Maybe it is, but i didn’t notice that yet!

So now I’ve got 2 motion sensors with the following features:

• powered by 3 * 1.2V, 2000 mAh rechargeable batteries;
• PIR with digital output, 100µA standby power usage and 5m detection range;
• a JeeNode that’s effectively running only a total of about 180 seconds per day (0.2 %), even with 350-400 motion reports and lots of heartbeats. The rest of the time the JeeNode is in power down mode;
• it’s ZigBee based which is better than 433 MHz in my opinion, especially when you’ve got a lot of sensors;
• relatively small sensor housing compared to commercial (mostly big and ugly) products;
• completely DIY so everything is how i want it to be;
• interrupt-based, the best you can get I’d say;
• need i go on? 

I’m gonna monitor this sensor very closely in the coming months and learn from it. Here you see one of the sensors being used in the kitchen:

Motion v2 in the kitchen

The sketch that’s currently running on these sensors can be found here.

Finished? Almost; some loose ends in the sketch. Maybe it can be made even smaller/faster/less energy consuming. But I’ll look into that when the 3rd sensor is built.

This is how my ZigBee Coordinator has been on my desk since the beginning:

Not a good idea to keep it this way forever. So it was time to give it a nice enclosure and move it to the meter cabinet. I found an enclosure in which there’s plenty of room for the XBee Explorer board. Some sawing, drilling and adjusting resulted in the following.

That looks much better! It doesn’t bring any new functionality, but it does make things look more “complete”…one of those things i often forget, because the next thing is already waiting to get started…

I have the feeling i’m getting somewhere

I updated my ZigBee network webpage and added a configuration panel with which i can configure all the XBee radios in my WSN (well, it’s a WSAN actually).

XBee config

Since my Home Automation system doesn’t have a GUI of itself and configuring XBee radios from a touchscreen without keyboard didn’t sound like a good idea either, i thought it would be best to create a web page for that. There’s still some work to be done in showing the XBee response on the page after the remote AT command has executed, but that’s a minor thing; “under water” i can see everything is working fine. With a click of the ‘Send’ button the values entered on the page are concatenated into a single string with a special delimiter and then sent off to my system using XMLRPC. The ZigBee API interface will then construct 1 or more ZigBee frames based on the values, send those frames to the targeted XBee radio(s) and wait for the responses to arrive. That’s it, basically.

Being able to do all this, is what makes me feel i’m getting somewhere; now that i’m able to monitor and configure my XBee radios in a convenient way, it’s time to really move on and start ‘mass production’ of all kinds of sensors and other stuff that are on my wish list.. starting with a bunch of motion detectors and a LED strip controller! After that, some room-oriented sensors (combining motion, temperature, light and perhaps humidity in one package) will be made. Can’t wait!

With an increasing amount of XBee modules operational (6, at the time i write this)  and the nature of a ZigBee network, i felt the need to monitor some network related stuff; what’s going on in there?? Do my End Devices make use of a Router when i relocate them, further away from the Coordinator? What about signal strength? All those questions can be answered with the ZigBee Network monitor i created last weekend.

It’s totally integrated into my Domotica system of course, which takes care of 95% of all the work; what was left was parsing the Remote AT Command responses coming back from the XBees. For example, a response byte of 33 to the ‘DB’ command means that the RSSI of the last received packet is -51 dBm.  Task scheduler, database storage, events being triggered on value changes, it’s all available. Want to create a chart of RSSI values? Easy. Receive SMS alert when a XBee is ‘lost’? Consider it done.

I created a webpage that shows the current values for some XBee configuration values, produced by this ZigBee Network monitor. No more X-CTU for me (OK, not completely: uploading the right firmware and changing some initial settings will still be done from behind the PC…) But once the right PAN ID has been set and the XBee has joined, local configuration isn’t needed anymore. This makes life a lot easier!

X-CTU tool

One thing i would really like, is being able to monitor the voltage the JeeNode and XBee are running on. Now the XBee has a %V command, specially for reading the voltage on the Vcc pin. So let’s see of i can use this.

The first thing i noticed was that the XBee i configured with the AT End Device firmware, didn’t respond to the %V command. Hmm, correct; the manual was very clear about it: the %V command is only supported by a Router  and not by a Coordinator or an End Device. And it’s those End Devices  (which will run on batteries) that i want to monitor…

OK.. next command to have a look at was the ‘IS‘ command, which stands for Force Sample; this command forces a read of all enabled digital and analog input lines and a small comment told me it could also return the supply voltage: “Analog samples are ordered sequentially from AD0/DIO0 to AD3/DIO3, to the supply voltage.”  So lets try this one, shouldn’t be to hard i guess?

So i added support for this command to my API and started sending frames to the XBee:

Sending frame:7E 00 0F 17 01 00 13 A2 00 40 33 1F 7A A2 ED 00 49 53 FB

I won’t go into detail of every byte in the frame above, but the 2 bytes marked in red are the ASCII codes for ‘I’ and ‘S’: yes, ‘IS’, the command we want to be executed on the remote XBee. The response that came back from the XBee was encouraging, however, no supply voltage was present, only the values of some random Analog input lines i enabled:

Rcvd Frame:97 01 00 13 A2 00 40 33 1F 7A A2 ED 49 53 00 01 00 00 02 02 09
FrameID=1, Command=IS, Status=0, Command Data size = 6 (01 00 00 02 02 09)

With the help of an example i found out the meaning of the Command data:

IS response example

OK… the frames that were being received looked nice, but it’s not what i want… where’s the supply voltage? The example above doesn’t show it either.. but it must be possible, right?

After searching for more than an hour, i suddenly bumped upon a setting in the X-CTU tool (in the I/O Sampling section), that had the following description:

Configure the supply voltage high threshold.  If the supply voltage measurement equals or drops below this threshold, the supply voltage will be included in an IO sample transmission.  RANGE:0-0XFFFF

Aahh, that must be it… this setting has a default of 0, causing the supply voltage to never be included in an IO sample! I set the value to FFFF, disabled all other I/O lines on the XBee et voila:

Rcvd Frame:97 01 00 13 A2 00 40 33 1F 7A A2 ED 49 53 00 01 00 00 80 0A BC
FrameID=1, Command=IS, Status=0, Command Data size = 6 (01 00 00 80 0A BC)

This means there is 1 sample set, containing the supply voltage, and the value is: 0ABC.

Multiply this with 1200/1024 and you get the supply voltage in mV:

($0ABC =) 2748 * 1200/1024 = 3220 mV. Great!

Tomorrow i’ll add some code to my HA system to periodically send an IS command to this XBee and store the results. And then just wait and see what happens when i let a JeeNode and XBee running on alkaline batteries 24/7…

After my problems with the MS13 sensors yesterday, i managed to find some spare time (even though, or maybe because it was father’s day) to write a sketch for the new motion sensor i created during the last couple of weeks. Always taking one step at a time, i located the first prototype of this sensor at a place where i can see the enclosure LED from the living room: i want to know how it performs…

New motion sensor

Now powered by 3 rechargable NiCd batteries and with all hardware nicely put away in the enclosure. In due time the enclosure will be moved out of sight so only the PIR will be visible. I’ve decided to use 3.5 mm jack plugs to be able to disconnect the enclosure from the sensor, so i can easily take the enclosure back to my office, because i don’t think the JeeNode is already running the final version of the ‘PIR’ sketch…

A new class, 2 database records and 1 line of code were enough to get the sensor working in my Domotica system:

procedure TAMN31112.ProcessInterfaceData;
begin
  Pin(1).AsBoolean:= (O.Data[1]='1');
end;

The new PIR can be viewed from my website (it’s called BP PIR):

Battery powered PIR

The sketch is still under development; for instance, how much difference would it make if i change the DigitalRead() into a bitRead()? I’ll have to read more about that on JeeLabs … Other questions are: should i increase the heartbeat interval (currently 45 seconds) or the Motion report interval? Can i create some sort of battery power monitoring with the XBee? But that will all be investigated when i’ve finished building my second motion sensor based on JeeNode and XBee..

This weekend i spent some time to make the experimental PIR sensor setup i made some time ago, a bit more permanent. Ingredients:

• Gray enclosure;
• Battery holder;
• JeeNode;
• XBee breakout board;
• Digi XBee;
• Red LED;
• PIR;
• PIR enclosure;
• 100 kOhm resistor;
• Wire, double sided tape, hot glue.

The enclosure i used this time is a bit different from the enclosure i used on a previous occasion. This one lacks the inner ribs and opening and closing is a bit harder: for opening the enclosure you need to put a screwdriver between the 2 halves and twist it to get the enclosure open.  The first thing i did was making my life easier by removing the ribs that keep the 2 halves together on one side of the enclosure. Some more modifications here and there now make it possible to open the enclosure without any additional tools, but still will not open by accident.

I drilled a 10 mm hole into the PIR enclosure so that the PIR fitted nicely through the top plate; a drop of super glue on the inside did the rest. There was plenty of room for the 100k pull-down resistor inside the PIR enclosure so i soldered it to the PIR there. An extra hole of 4 mm and a cable tie for the wire completed the PIR box.

JeeNode, XBee

This being my first motion sensor built this way, i added a LED to be able to see what the XBee radio is doing; is it still transmitting or not, when, how often, etc. ? Maybe this is overkill, but when this sensor is placed somewhere in the house with no computer screen nearby, it can be very handy to see if the sensor is still functioning instead of running to and from the nearest screen…
If the flickering of the LED is to visible or annoying in the future, i can always disable it or make it invisible by a piece of tape over it; but for now, this LED seemed like a good idea to have. The LED lights up when the XBee is on and from the duration that the LED stays on i can see what’s happening; whether it’s transmitting (very short durations) or having PAN trouble (long).

The software part of this sensor will be the most time consuming of it all i guess. Since i want it to be battery powered, i’ll have to consider what is relevant information for my Domotica system, and when it is. In fact, the only thing that really matters is one single thing: fast motion detection! All the rest is less important.
Cause what do we Domoticans use this motion detection for? To turn things ON… not OFF; at least, i don’t.

Further more, a quick look in my events history tells me that from 01-04-2010 till today i missed (my 433 MHz RFXCOM receivers, i mean) a total 869 ‘OFF’ transmissions (meaning “no motion”) from my 10 MS13 motion detectors. That’s way to much to be called reliable! So my system already has the capability to deal with this situation of missing ‘OFF’ transmissions; when a MS13 hasn’t reported neither an ‘ON’ nor an ‘OFF’ for a specific time interval, i set the motion sensor back to ‘OFF’ in software.

So.. i could as well do without this ‘OFF’ completely; i don’t use it as a trigger, so why send this non-information anyway?

What i do want to have is a heartbeat, every 90 seconds or so. And i would like to have an ‘ON’ being sent with a specific interval when motion is detected continuously. That’s what I’ll be working on in the coming week.

To be continued.

Now that my Zigbee/Jeenode equipped pressure sensor is working for 3 months without any problems, it was time to leave the breadboard stage and move on to something more permanent. While ordering new Jeenodes at Jean-Claude Wipplers shop, i stumbled upon a post (i should read his daily weblog more often!) that showed me just what i needed: an enclosure that looked just right for this job. I ordered the Jeenodes, 2 enclosures (1 extra for when i mess up the first one and don’t want to wait for a second delivery..) and some other handy stuff.

First i sawed off the part of the PCB that i didn’t need, to decrease it’s size.

JeeNode PCB size reduction

Guess what? Now the length of the PCB equals the internal width of the enclosure! Nice… I still had some battery holders laying around that also fitted quite well:

Enclosure, batt holder and JeeNode

I didn’t want to leave off the FTDI headers, so i used 6 straight headers and removed the plastic strip from the headers after the headers were soldered onto the PCB. With the plastic headers left on, the completed PCB was just a bit to wide for the enclosure, which caused tension and the enclosure wouldn’t close well anymore.

Next item that had to be prepared, was the XBee Breakout Board. Normally the top of this Breakout Board contains the 2mm XBee headers and the 0.1″ spaced headers are at the opposite side. I removed the bottom headers i soldered in when i used this board for other purposes and soldered 6 wires on it from the top, only for those pins i really needed:

XBee Breakout Board

Pin 1 (labeled Vcc) for Power, Pin 3  (labeled DIN) for transmission, Pin 9 (DTR) for controlling Sleep mode, Pin 10 (GND), Pin 11(CTS) and Pin 12 (ON) for the LED. This makes the Breakout board a lot thinner and the wires are coming out between the board and the XBee module.

After soldering the wires coming from the XBee board to the JeeNode, drilling a hole for the LED (which blinks when a pressure sample is being sent), soldering the wires and gluing the battery holder into the enclosure, it looked like this:

Almost done!

The FTDI headers are very handy now, for uploading the sketch with the JeeNode already inside the enclosure; cause all you have to do is open the enclosure, gently lift up the left side of the JeeNode and connect the cable. So whenever i need to upgrade the JeeNode, i don’t have to worry about connecting issues.

FTDI cable connected to the JeeNode

Now all there was left to do was moving the XBee module and the Pressure Plug from the Breadboard to their new ‘home’, add 4 batteries, click on the other half of the enclosure and.. my first WAF certified sensor was born!

Now that the new floor is nearly finished, i can start working on some Home Automation related subjects again; the first was using LED strips in the kitchen.

LED strips

In total 4 segments of LED strip are used; 2 near the floor at the plinths of the lower kitchen cabinets, 1 at the counter top and 1 on top of the upper kitchen cabinets.

Today i finished controlling all these LED strips individually.

I don’t have Ethernet in the kitchen, so i used the ZigBee approach (again ). I mounted a XBee on a Sparkfun XBee RS232 board and connected it to the Chromoflex RS232 RX input:

XBee and Chromoflex in a box

The XBee RS232 board is powered by the adapter that also powers the Chromoflex, so all i needed was a wall outlet for the Chromoflex adapter and the Chromoflex was “connected”.

Now it was time to add control functions to my Touchscreen application, running on my Asus TOP in the livingroom. I added a “LED” button on the floorplan, in the middle of the kitchen:

LED button on the floorplan

And i found a very cool Trackbar Control and created a new pop-up form with it, that appears when you push the “LED” button:

LED Trackbar

With this form i can control each LED segment individually. To minimize traffic, i used the same approach as i did earlier with controlling my thermostat; a timer event fires when the Trackbar value hasn’t changed for 1.5 seconds and sends the new value to my Domotica System by XMLRPC:

That’s all there is to it. My Domotica system takes care of the rest e.g. building the Chromoflex packet based on the USP3 protocol, wrapping it in a XBee Transmit Request packet and sending it to the ZigBee coordinator. Home Automation is sooo cool

Well, this post could just as well be called Wireless Chromoflex controller, or Zigbee LED Strip controller, or …

What i’m actually trying to accomplish is placing 14 meters of LED strip, split into 5 separately controllable parts in my house, without the need of additional wiring (i hate that!).  Just plug it into the mains and start using it… that’s the goal.

Yesterday the last goods i was waiting for arrived, so tonight it was time to make some sort of ‘proof of concept’; would i be able to control a Chromoflex by using Zigbee as transport medium instead of wires? Of course! Why wouldn’t it? But it’s always nice to actually see it working with your own eyes; and tonight i did.

Wireless Chromoflex

In terms of programming, enabling my Home Automation system to be able to control an interface like the Chromoflex by using Zigbee, needed some additional coding. Normally an interface is addressed directly over TCP/IP or RS232, but this time i could not transmit the Chromoflex packet directly; it had to be encapsulated in a Zigbee Transmit Request frame. A feature that will be very useful in the future i guess.

To be continued…