I’ve been playing with the rewritten RF24 and RF24Network librariy forks and am impressed. The RF24Network library is a much more reliable way of using multiple nodes than just using the same channel/pipe and hoping you won’t get timing conflicts with RF24 e.g. I’d find the data from 2 nodes would merge! Also hardware SPI finally works on the Raspberry Pi.

I’ve updated my weather station scripts, I now have the RPi as the master receiving node0 (with a new 17dBm antenna!); the MOSFET-based Arduino as node1 in the shed, but with the BMP085 pressure/altitude disabled as it was returning absolute rubbish, I think its a hardware issue and not the Adafruit lib; and the older non-MOSFET Arduino as node2 in my office, just reporting its DS18B20 readings in an attempt to prolong battery life – I’ve desoldered the DHT11/BMP085 to see if that helps.

I’ve breadboarded up a node3 that’s powered by a CR2032 coincell and just has the ATmega328P, chip-antenna nRF24L01+, TO92-packaged DS18B20 and two resistors, just to see how the battery life goes. I might even make a 5v board that can be mains powered – or a USB-powered SFE Pro Micro….

My new scripts are here and a graph of the results showing both sensor boards is below:

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