Am I using the right program/hardware?

General
21

I had perhaps forgot one important thing! Using ESPEasy you have to configure your broker to treat retained messages send with QoS=0 as the same as if they are sent with QoS>0. otherwise the node-red home node must run when the ESP is booting.
In mqtt explorer they could „look retained“ but they are not!

22

Thanks @Christian-Me, all working right now.

1 Like
23

Hi @Christian-Me, trust you are doing well. So I can now report 6 nodes on your firmware, all working very well - thank you! What I curious about is, what the best management and status software would be to get an instant view of your complete installation. I opted for HoDD - Homie Device Discovery (https://github.com/rroemhild/hodd) from rroemhild/ hodd, which does report all the homie devices. I don't however see the status? See screenshot below. So I know this is not your software, but perhaps you have an idea, why only the Nodes TAB shows data, but not the other three Tabs. Also any suggestion on which software you would recommend to use a full status check of the current implementation?

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24

Hi, nice to hear that.

Yes, "device surveillance" is on my to do list (mentioned somewhere in the readme.md :wink:
I know the HoDD but I prefer to do this task within Node-RED.

Any Idea what is needed from your side? Currently I build a syslog server for my ESPs and others on the Node-RED dashboard using a modified version of UI-Table, good for debugging but not for an overview of the sensors health status.

My idea: Table with all devices showing

  • device name
  • device state ($state + last seen + ....) a simple to read indicator green / yellow / red (all ok / sleeping, intentional offline or rebooting more often than threshold / offline or other problems)
  • extra info: Battery, WIFI RF quality (provided by the $state extension)
  • additional info: uptime, ram, heap, stack, system load, firmware ... (provided by the $fw extention and other measurements like latency), syslog errors/warnings ...

and a indicater which can be placed on a prominent location (green/ yellow / red) with some icons (like on an mobile phone)

25

Hi Chris

Yes I agree with you, do it on NodeRed. I also like your suggestions, it should provide you with an overview of all live devices, perhaps even have a list of those that was once live, but not anymore. I will also add the IP address . I had a funny once, when my router reset, and the IP changed. I had a fixed IP on the router but not on the ESP. Lesson learned, I now have a fixed IP on ESP and also a rule which transmits the IP, via MQTT. Having the IP as part of status, is a nice way to confirm all is in order.

Kind regards,

Deon du Preez

083-306-8561

26

All of this information is available within the Homie convention. You have the states init, ready, sleeping, lost, disconnected and alert
It only takes a little time that I implement this (first I have to get ui-table PR and the syslog server done)
I personally have switched back to dynamic IP addresses after I accidentally assigned two ESPs with the same address which where both on an remote location. Very bad because you had to reach at least one to correct the ip over the serial interface