Bluetooth and BLE status

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@rrooggiieerr said in Bluetooth and BLE status:

Hi @zsiti, that’s all great, however I consider my BLE and related plugins still in beta. I’m waiting for some more response. I’m by no means a Coffeescript expert, this is actually my first proper implementation using that language, and it would be great if a fellow @developer could have a look at my code and give me feedback.

My idea behind channeling more users at your plugin was that the more people use it, the more feedback you get, and that way the plugin will get better and better

One thing I’m particularly interested in is if the values of the Mi Flora are consistent. I sometimes see some errors where the vaules of the light intensity and humidity seem to be switched, but I can’t find a bug in my code. Also the battery seems to drain a bit faster. Could you share your experiences on this?

I’ll be testing your plugin in parallel with the open-homeautomation miflora python script which was the base of my solution with parsing an output file with logwatcher. If I’ll find any inconsistencies, I’ll get back to you. In my experience if the polling time is frequent, it will cause fast battery draining. It depends on the needs of the user of course, but for me polling every hour is enough, and my sensors’ battery level drains very slow. Could you make configurable poll time perhaps? EDIT: I see you’ve already implemented this in the latest version I’ll set my sensors to 1hr polling, and see if the battery drains fast or not.

Also the plugins can’t yet be found in the Pimatic plugin manager, actually the BLE plugin in there is an old, not working, one. So I also need to take some actions to make that work.

As you’ve mentioned by @Michael-Rudek if your plugin will be stable enough, you should push it to npm, so pimatic users can get is easier.

Your work on this is much appreciated by me, and I’m sure by the community as well

I just released a new version of the packages and added them to npm

Plugins for Mi Flora and iTag have been renamed to pimatic-ble-mi-flora and pimatic-ble-itag

Do i have to delete the old plugins manually?
I´m getting a error [pimatic]: Can't update a git repository!

Honestly I don’t know. I’m not very familiar with npm. I copy my release to my pimatic plugins folder by hand and don’t use npm yet to install my own plugins

What does error [pimatic]: Could not initialize the plugin "ble": Cannot find module '../build/Release/binding.node' mean?

Yes, it seems you have to uninstall the plugins you installed over GIT first

The ble-plugin is not working anymore.
I´m getting:
[pimatic] info: Loading plugin: "pimatic-ble" (0.9.3)
[pimatic] info: Could not get plugin info from update server, request info from npm
[pimatic] error: 404 - {}
and
error [pimatic]: Could not initialize the plugin "ble": Cannot find module '../build/Release/binding.node'

For me it works if I uninstall the ble plugins in the Plugins screen, restart Pimatic and then reinstall them

Ok, didn´t unistall from the plugin screen, i only deleted it

You didn´t change the template of mi-flora?

@rrooggiieerr
It works great… thanks sooo much

So I installed pimatic on a RPi0W to monitor my 5 Mi Flora sensors. Thanksalot @rrooggiieerr for the plugins!

One question that I somehow failed to find out: what is the unit of the interval setting? And what should it be set to? And what do I have to do for a new setting to take effect? I left it at the default which seems to poll every 5’ and I get tons of errors like
[pimatic-ble]: Device Mi Flora 5 not disconnected: disconnecting
I changed it to 10000 but the polling interval doesn’t seem to change. Before I waste tons of time, would somebody be willing to help me out?

thanks in advance,
beat

@bludin Hi. I assume @rrooggiieerr will get back to you soon, however at the moment he seems to be very busy. Meanwhile I had a brief a look at the implementation.

One question that I somehow failed to find out: what is the unit of the interval setting?

The interval is given in milliseconds and the default value is 300000 (300 seconds).

And what should it be set to?

Well, my assumption is it OK to stay with the default.

And what do I have to do for a new setting to take effect? … I changed it to 10000 but the polling interval doesn’t seem to change.

Device configuration changes applied with device editor take immediate effect. If the polling interval does not change this may be due to a bug in the device implementation. In case of doubt restart pimatic and check the device configuration.

I get tons of errors

Well, you did not say what the timeline of message is. Are you seeing lots of error messages every few seconds or is it a longer time interval you’re referring to? I am also wondering whether or not you get sensor values at times. Perhaps you can post an excerpt of the log file (possibly copy from pimatic-daemon.log file rather than copying log messages from the Web UI). See also https://forum.pimatic.org/topic/1179/how-to-post-code-snippets-and-alike-on-the-forum

I changed it to 10000 but the polling interval doesn’t seem to change.

Unfortunately, the device implementation is fully aligned with the debug conventions. Therefore, I am not sure whether or not you’re able to get debug messages from the plugin. If debug messaging works you see message like the message below.

Connection interval for device MyDevice 300000

Sorry folks, I just started a world trip end of May so won’t be developing for Pimatic in the near future

@rrooggiieerr said in Bluetooth and BLE status:

Sorry folks, I just started a world trip end of May so won’t be developing for Pimatic in the near future

I suppose your trip started end of March, right? Anyhow, have a good time!
If you have not done already please consider setting up a co-maintainer on github and npmjs. I am happy to eventually look into this. Thanks!

@mwittig thanks a lot for looking into this and for bearing with a total newbie.
However, it seems like the problem has now magically vanished - after I changed the power supply. Maybe the old one was producing interferences or was unstable in a way that affected the comm chip of the RPi0W (I heard they are much more sensitive than the CPU). Thanks again, Beat

@bludin said in Bluetooth and BLE status:

However, it seems like the problem has now magically vanished - after I changed the power supply. Maybe the old one was producing interferences or was unstable in a way that affected the comm chip of the RPi0W (I heard they are much more sensitive than the CPU).

Thanks for the feedback. Power supplies frequently cause problems. It is great you found the error cause.

EDIT: A side note as you said you have 5 Mi Flora Sensors. Apparently, the Raspberry BLE tranceiver (like many others) can only handle up to 5 simultaneous connections. Other sources report it can handle up to 7 devices. If the limit is exceeded you will likely see all sorts of error messages. I am not sure this has been stated earlier. So I thought it might good to know just I case you’re planning to add more devices.
https://github.com/noble/noble#maximum-simultaneous-connections
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33488294/maximum-no-of-ble-connection-using-bluez?utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=google_rich_qa
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=172897
https://github.com/noble/noble/issues/387

Hey guys, it’s been a long time without being active.

I’m happy there’s a native soultion for the mi-flora now, but i can’t get it to autodetect my devices. I couldn’t figure out what’s wrong, i even tried a fresh raspbian / pimatic install to find my sensors by autodetect.

when scanning it shows:

pimatic-ble: Scanning for BLE devices

pimatic-ble-mi-flora: Scanning for Mi Flora plant sensors

But nothing appears.

Scanning in terminal shows the following:

pi@home-pi:~ $ sudo hcitool lescan
LE Scan ...
C4:7C:8D:63:37:85 (unknown)
C4:7C:8D:63:37:85 Flower care
C4:7C:8D:63:37:85 (unknown)
C4:7C:8D:63:37:85 Flower care
C4:7C:8D:63:37:85 (unknown)
C4:7C:8D:63:37:85 Flower care

Which seems like recognizing the mi-flora devices …

This is my new config (no devices etc set up…):
https://pastebin.com/DAjuJm8H

Any clue what i’m doing wrong?

Thanks in advance,
Chris

I´m not sure if the autoscan is working.
Put the C4:7C:8D:63:37:85 in your config
Like:

{
  "id": "mi-flora",
  "class": "MiFloraDevice",
  "name": "Plant",
  "uuid": "c47c8d633785",
  "interval": 60000
}

@michael-rudek
Thanks a lot! I tried this before reinstalling the whole system and it didn’t work. Now it does!

Greetings.

Hey all i`m new here got a question…

Does someone have a nice tut to help me started using bluetooth module with my nano??
And the wire connections where can i find those? did search the internet for hours but i can`t find anything good???

thankss