Wireless Sensor Tags

Sun Mar 18 11:30:17 EDT 2018

James,
	Thanks for the offer to be one of your “guinea pigs” but I think I’ll play around with the wireless sensor tags for now. However, I did just order a few of the Dallas 1-wire sensors for kicks. Let us know when your module is generally available and I’ll sign up for one then.

Thanks,
Mark 

> On Mar 18, 2018, at 10:29 AM, James Sentman <james at sentman.com> wrote:
> 
> good morning Mark!
> 
> If I remember correctly those tags were the reason that I originally built what has become the JSON server interface. Their URL trigger capability will work fine with that. The link Tom posted is to the correct info.
> 
> There is a checkbox somewhere on the interface to them that will make the URL connection locally from their little hub on the inside of your network and you definitely want to do that so that you don’t have to setup a passthrough and dyndns and NAT stuff for it to get to XTension from their cloud which is where it will come from otherwise.
> 
> I’m not sure there is any way to poll them, they run on their tiny internal batteries and to save their power only wake up and report a change when they find there has been a change. There was some feature about how often a tag woke up and for how long it stayed awake and I vaguely remember that it would respond to a request during this time and maybe the hub kept trying to contact the tag until it woke up and would report back so it might be possible. I don’t recall that there was any way for us to talk to them though, you could start that process through
> 
> I haven’t used them in some time so I’m not running the most recent firmware and don’t know how their system has evolved. If you can point me to their latest documentation I will have a look through and see if I can find some direct command that we can send to ask it to report back.
> 
> Alternatively I have some arduino compatible boards here that I had made that are a precursor to some that I mean to sell to you good folks here soon. They have an already working XTension plugin and can connect over wifi. They will host up to 16 dallas one wire temp sensors and you can control the frequency of how often they report a reading with a minimum of every 5 seconds up to half an hour or so. You could measure the cabinet temp, the room temp, the temp of specific devices and all sorts of things. I believe the firmware for both the wifi interface and the device is very solid now, it’s taken a lot longer to get right than I expected when starting this project! I have a short run of boards that are only 3 channel output that I don’t intend to sell as I quickly updated the design to 4 and 6 channel for dimming. If you’d like to be a guinea pig for that system I can send you one of those 3 channel output ones for my cost plus shipping. The outputs could control 12 or 24v fans and likely PWM their speed depending on the type of fan, or control a relay to switch a 120v fan system, or just report the temp to XTension and you can put the fans on a regular ZWave or other appliance module. Drop me a note off the list if you’d like to experiment with that. I’m gearing up tomorrow to do up several kits for other folks who are on the guinea pig list ;) (there are also other GPIO inputs and outputs that you could use for other sensing like is the cabinet door open or virtually anything else you can imagine you could do with GPIO. The firmware supports digital on/off, reading a high or low value from a contact closure, reading pulses as a pulse counter and some of the inputs support reading analog values from 0 to 5v too, all of which is configurable from XTension without having to reprogram them or know anything about the arduino environment) If you got fans that have a tachometer output the pulse reading might be able to actually verify that the fan is spinning and not clogged up or stuck or broken. I’m not sure what the maximum frequency of that input could be, I always imagined it for things like water flow sensors or pulse output electric meters and not for things like that. It would be an interesting experiment for something that fast. Even if it wasn’t an accurate number you’d still at least know it was spinning. If I need to I can move the counter internally to a larger integer field and use up a few more bytes of memory so that it can count to higher numbers...
> 
> -James
> 
>> On Mar 18, 2018, at 9:59 AM, Tom Yarmas <tom at yarmas.com <mailto:tom at yarmas.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Not sure about polling them, but they are supported with Xtension - http://machomeautomation.com/doku.php/supported_hardware/wireless_tags <http://machomeautomation.com/doku.php/supported_hardware/wireless_tags>
>> 
>> I used them a bit, but never really liked them very much. They did not react quickly enough, in my opinion.
>> 
>> -tom
>> 
>>> On Mar 18, 2018, at 9:11 AM, Mark Nettleingham <markfn at comcast.net <mailto:markfn at comcast.net>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 	Has anone used XTension to get data from Wireless Sensor Tags <https://store.wirelesstag.net/collections/all>?
>>> 
>>> 	I have been using these for years to get warnings that my refrigerator or freezer has been left open and a warning that the temperature has gone astray. So far they work fairly well with iOS. However I now have a reason to automate a fan within an A/V cabinet and of course I’d like to use XTension  (why do things simply when you can add a computer and make it very much more complicated?).
>>> 
>>> 	These tags are very small and the service has the ability to trigger an URL. However, I’d like to poll them directly with XTension if possible. So, I thought I’d see if someone else has attempted this and avoid re-inventing a solution.
> 
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