Categories
VSCP

To change the world

Some status or spam depending on how you look at it.

2015-05-06_22-57-17

For a long time USA was a white spot on the VSCP map but this has changed lately. Hurray!  Just need some  people in the mid-west as well to cover all states.  It’s been a great year so far for VSCP. Well – I am still starving. No, that is not a joke.  But interest is definitely going up. So there is hope. Fifteen year in August.  0b00001111. I hope this is the lucky number. 😉

For me this spring is all about building the new modules. CAN4VSCP based stuff first, then Ethernet and lastly wireless.  I really would like to wipe the VSCP == CAN off but stuck in CAN land for a while more as it seems.

For most of the fourteen years there has been very little user contribution. Yes I have complained about that many times. Sorry. There has been a lot of forking, and writing the same thing another time, and plans to change things just because it’s possible.  Most of a time lasting for half a year or a year and then abandoned. Yes I have seen a lot of that up to now. Maybe it must be like that and maybe all projects struggle with that. Anyway new things will come.

The biggest task for me right now is to move the last piece, the VSCP daemon, to the fossa communication engine. This is a lot of work but work that is needed to be done. It will give a lot of benefits though like added security, CoAP support, MQTT broker built into the daemon and some more nice stuff. If we get a rainy summer here in Sweden I hope this happens during the summer.

The web i/f is the next priority. I have nor the interest nor the knowledge to build web applications. It’s just the same as the things that is in place today. It would have been much faster and much nicer if done by someone interested in web development and knowledgeable in it. But I have asked so many time for contributions in this area (or collaborations with other projects) (and I will not ask again) so I will do this anyway. So expect new stuff here as well. Some phone stuff to.

Another area that has priority is a package for Linux including Raspberry Pi. This is just a matter of having the time to do it. But it will come.

There is some code already for automation in the VSCP daemon. This is what you see for heart beats from the demon and sunset etc event. The plan is that the daemon will collect information about nodes and make this info available in the web interface and in the tcp/ip interface. This will also make it possible to use real world names instead of GUID’s for a user to identify nodes.

Another is internal scripting in the daemon dm. Maybe v8 (Javascript, same as node.js). This would mean that could execute internal scripts when things happen and can handle all this remotely. In the end I hope driver installation etc also will be possible to do remotely.

IPv6 support all over the place is another task.

The most important task of all is the wizard additions to the mdf. This is something that is lingering from the initial plan and is the key to the common configuration. All we see today (in VSCP works) is developer oriented. This can change that. Think of a xml description that can take a user through a number of setup screens to set up a node in a special way. So when a user discovers a node he/she get the standard mdf information but also a bunch of wizards to set up special functionality.  Hiding registers/abstractions and dm. A typical usage example is a cabin with a number of interconnected CAN4VSCP modules. One of them is a Bluetooth module and I can connect to this module with my phone or my tablet and I then see the rest of the modules. And this can configure them or check status for them. This I also hope will be in place, at least in parts, after the summer (if it rains).

I saw a write down of “IoT protocols” the other day. It was a list containing Bluetooth, MQTT, IPv6 and a lot of other transport mechanisms. Yes the header was “IoT protocols”. And I recalled the time before Internet became common.  Yes there was a time when I called a New York number for EUR 50 a minute and ran uucp (very fast I can add) to get/send newsgroup updates. But at that time hypertext was big. A lot of programs where available providing numerous hypertext solutions so connect information.  And it was not hard to see that this was an important thought at the time. But everyone was talking about wires. Yes big standard comites in Europe talked and talked and talked and wrote reports after reports. Once at a Microsoft event when a speaker was talking about Netbeu one man in the audience asked about the future of TCP/IP and all five hundred in the audience laughed at him. Novell, Microsoft would change the world. Hypertext suddenly emerged as a solution for sharing information over the wires (HTML/HTTP) and tcp/ip became the transport of choice.  Not because it was the best solution around. But because it was there and was ready. The world was hanged for ever,.  I’m not afraid to say that VSCP will change the world.  It will. Eventually. 😉

Ok enough with words for today. Enjoy life everyone and stay foolish, be hungry.
/Ake

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