Tracker for MySensors messages

I needed a simple tool for keeping track of all the MySensors nodes which I had built and deployed around the house over the years:

• what is the battery level of a sensor node?
• what was the last time I changed the battery on that sensor node, i.e. how many months has it been running with the current battery?
• see at a glance if a sensor has crashed, i.e. has not sent any messages for, say, more than a day
• is a sensor node sending strange messages?

For a detailed description of the intended behavior of the app (i.e. the requirements specification), see requirements.

This is part of my home automation setup. For an overview, see my blog.

Prerequisites

The app assumes that all MySensors messages are captured by an MQTT gateway, as described on the MySensors website

The app is written in Python 3. I have tested this both on my Microsoft Windows 10 development machine, and on a Debian 10 (Buster) Linux virtual server.

The app uses an Sqlite database.

The app uses the Peewee library to access the database, the Flask web framework, and the Eclipe Paho MQTT library to listen to the MQTT messages published by the MySensors gateways.

On my virtual linux server that runs the app, I just did

sudo apt-get install sqlite3
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-venv python3-dev

Installation

Install the source files in any folder, say ~/mytracker . Now install the required libraries

cd ~/mytracker
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip3 install peewee flask wtforms paho-mqtt

Now you can just run the app

venv/bin/python app.py

This will start the built-in webserver on port 5000.

The Flask people recommend not to use the built-in server for a production environment, but I decided it was good enough for my use at home. This has been running for >6 months now, without a glitch. logging messsages from ~20 MySensors nodes.

Browse to http://servername:5000/nodes, and you should see the MySensorsTracker UI.

Configuration

In the main function in app.py, you need to adjust the MQTT server name and topic to subscribe to.

In my home, the MQTT broker (mosquitto) runs on a server named ha-server, and the MySensors messages are received by two gateways, which then publish them via MQTT as my/1/stat/... and my/2/stat/..., respectively. Some MySensors nodes are in range for both gateways, so their messages are published twice, which is filtered out by the app, in function on_message().

Permanent Use

For long-term use, I am running this under supervisord (see http://supervisord.org/index.html).

I created /etc/supervisor/conf.d/mytracker.conf and entered

[program:mytracker]
command=/home/admin/mytracker/venv/bin/python app.py
directory=/home/admin/mytracker
stdout_logfile=/home/admin/mytracker/stdout.log
stderr_logfile=/home/admin/mytracker/stderr.log
user=admin
startretries=1 

(adjust the path for your configuration)

I edited /etc/supervisor/supervisord.conf and made sure it contains these lines

[inet_http_server]
port=*:9001 
[include]
files=conf.d/*.conf

Now I can view the status of the app by browsing to http://servername:9001