Category: VSCP

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HowTo's

Howto: Minimum VSCP wifi Level II node (VSCP PID detector)

In this  howto we will build a simple VSCP level II node that with the help of a PIR motion sensor detects motion and sends this as a VSCP event wireless to a VSCP daemon.

We use the famous ESP8266  for this  and work in the even more famous Arduino environment.  The ESP8266 comes in many flavors but a convenient form factor is the NodeMCU board.  You can buy it on Aliexpress or Ebay at a low-cost (USD 2.2).

There is also a baseboard available for the NodeMCU and I use it as it is convenient when working with a new design. It to is available on Aliexpress and Ebay at a low-cost (USD 1.54).

The last item you need is the PIR sensor, they to are available at low-cost. I bought mine from Ebay (USD 0.99).

If you haven’t set up your Arduino IDE for work with the ESP8266 you need to do that now.  Here is an excellent tutorial on how to do this. Make the blink example work before you move on.

I find the Arduino IDE a bit crude to work with so I use Visual Studio Code instead.  An excellent programming editor that works on all the major operation systems. I tend to use it more and more. But there are other options to such as Atom. Anyway instructions on how to get it working for Arduino development is here.  Make sure to set the “output” tag to a valid location in the .vscode/arduino.json file otherwise upload will be VERY slow.

You also need a VSCP daemon/server running for this example. All info about it is here.

To connect the sensor to the NodeMCU we need to know about he port mapping for the module which is a bit different from for other Arduino devices. It looks like this

static const uint8_t D0   = 16;
static const uint8_t D1   = 5;
static const uint8_t D2   = 4;
static const uint8_t D3   = 0;
static const uint8_t D4   = 2;
static const uint8_t D5   = 14;
static const uint8_t D6   = 12;
static const uint8_t D7   = 13;
static const uint8_t D8   = 15;
static const uint8_t D9   = 3;
static const uint8_t D10  = 1;

D0 has a blue LED connected to it so it is an obvious candidate for status. D1 can be used to connect to the PIR

The PIR device I have outputs a 3V signal even when powered with +5V so it is OK to connect directly to D1. So the three pins on the PIR

1     +5V
2     Output to D1 (High on detect)
3     GND

The LED on D0 light up when a LOW is written to it. This is opposite to the PIR output. We take care of this in software.

We implement a dump VSCP device here. This is a device that does not handle any of the register reads that “normal” VSCP requires and which don’t have a MDF file either. A dumb device has bit 14 set in the header.

We send two events. The heartbeat event (CLASS1.INFORMATION, Type=9) every minute. This event is recommended for all nodes as it is used for node discovery and detection. The other event we send is the detect event (CLASS1.INFORMATION, Type=49 detect) when an object is detected.

The test setup looks like this

and you can find the complete code is here

The heartbeat coming into the VSCP daemon (using VSCP works)

and the detect event

With the event in the VSCP daemon it is easy to add a DM row that for instance light up the lamps in a room. You can also use the rest or the websocket interface to do give visual feedback.

We will follow-up this howto with a post where we use the Expressif SDK instead of the Arduino and use a plain ESP8266 board. But also a ost where we implement a full Level II node that have registers and a MDF and show the advantage we get with a node like that over a dumb one.

An alternative wifi lib is documented here.

Categories
VSCP

Version 13.0.0 Aluminium of #VSCP & Friends is out

http://www.vscp.org

Version 13.0.0 – Aluminium of VSCP & Friends has been released today. A lot of new stuff of course, much more than we can list here.

Download is here: https://github.com/grodansparadis/vscp/releases/tag/v13.0.0
Docs are here:  http://www.vscp.org/docs/vscpd/doku.php

 

Categories
Decision Matrix (DM) Lua VSCP

#Lua scripting is now fully in place in the #VSCP server

The Lua scripting  implemention in the decision matrix of the VSCP server is now fully in place.  Remote variables can now be handled and events can be received and sent.

More functionality such as tcp/ip communication capabilities will be added as we go.

This is the last addition before the Aluminium release.

 

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Decision Matrix (DM) Javascript Lua VSCP

#Lua on the #VSCP server

It might not look beautiful looking at raw in the browser like this but this  is a decision matrix row that runs a Lua script. The scripts can read/write VSCP remote variables and send/receive events. &That means you have a choice between JavaScipt and Lua when you want to do something when events are received by the VSCP server. Events that can be a measurement or something else like a pressed button.

 

Categories
VSCP

Just a bit more

Five more adds and after that some tests, then release. So soon now!

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Sponsoring

New Donation

We today got an EUR 100 donation from https://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/hosting-revie/hostgator-review/ to the project.

Thank you!

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Linux VSCP

The perfect #VSCP gateway device

Matrix-713

https://www.artila.com/docs/Matrix-713/Matrix-713_Datasheet.pdf

Categories
HowTo's VSCP

#VSCP update process #howto

In previous versions of VSCP whenever you did an install all configuration files were replaced with the latest version. This is not true anymore.  Now the new version is instead written as a copy with the date of the install appended to it.  So if you after a “make install” or a “dpkg -i vscpd” want the latest configs you have to copy the backup to the actual config file and restart the VSCP server.

Files that is handled in this way is

/etc/vscp/vscpd.conf
/srv/vscp/dm.xml
/srv/vscp/simtempdata.txt
/srv/vscp/variables.xml

Also if you are on unstable code you should remove the databases before you start the updated server . Use

rm /srv/vscp/*.sqlite3

for this.

Also note that the web sample code is not installed in the install/update process no more. The process to get this subsystem installed with be described later.

Categories
Development VSCP

State of #VSCP

The work with the upcoming 13.0.0 Aluminium release is moving on.  As usual a few surprises has turned up adding some weeks to the work but things move forward as expected. Instead of being released before X-mas I now expect it to be out sometime late January next year.

For those of you doing home automation project I can recommend Domoticz and OpenHAB  (in that order). Both projects has a huge and active user base constantly adding support for new devices. Much better choices for HA freaks than VSCP will ever be.

I also want to take the opportunity to wish all of you a merry X-mas. This year has been a quite rough time here and that will continue for some time but with the support from many of you I have managed to keep servers active and also had a chance to get some new hardware to play with as well. Thanks for your generosity. I will never forget.

There are a few days more coding for me before I turn of my computer and rest for a couple of days. A good book, some movies and a lot of food is waiting for me and honestly I need the rest. I hope all of you enjoy a few days rest also.

Be hungry, stay foolish
/Ake

Categories
General HowTo's VSCP

#VSCP HOWTO: DM Using timers

Timers. One can wonder what they do in the decision matrix? They even have their own events defined in the CLASS2.VSCP class.

First let us define what a VSCP timer is.

A VSCP timer is a free running 32-bit timer with millisecond resolution.  That is they can hold  0xffffffff = 4294967295 milliseconds which mens they will roll over in about 50 days.

There are actions defined to

There is the following  internal events defined related to timers

To create and start a timer

<row enable="true" groupid="timers" >

  <comment>
    Create timer
  </comment>

  <mask priority="0"
        class="0xFFFF"
        type="0xFFFF"
 GUID="00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00" />

  <filter priority="0"
          class="65535"
          type="23"
 GUID="00:01:02:03:04:05:06:07:08:09:0A:0B:0C:0D:0E:0F" />

  <action>0x60</action>
  <param>
    1;10;timer1flag;true
  </param>

</row>

Here a timer with id = 1 is created. The timer has an initial time set to 10 seconds. When this timer elapses it will set the variable //timer1flag// to true. The last argument is the reload flag. Here it is set to true so when the time has elapsed the initial value will be loaded again and the timer will start again.

In the example above we could have added “;4” at the end of the parameter which would have the effect that the reload would stop after four runs. Default is thus forever.

When the timer is started a CLASS2.VSCPD, Type = 25 (0x0019) Timer started event is generated. When the ten seconds has gone and the timer elapses the  CLASS2.VSCPD, Type = 29 (0x001D) Timer Elapsed event is generated.

We can use either one of these two generated events to do any action periodically like this.

<row enable="true" groupid="timers" >

  <comment> 
    Handle timer elapsed
  </comment>

  <mask priority="0"
        class="0xFFFF"
        type="0xFFFF"
 GUID="00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00" />

  <filter priority="0"
          class="65535"
          type="29"
 GUID="00:01:02:03:04:05:06:07:08:09:0A:0B:0C:0D:0E:0F" />

  <action>0x70</action>
  <param>
    /srv/vscp/timefile;1;%isoboth: Timer with  id=%event.data.int32[0] elapsed %lf
  </param>

</row>


<row enable="true" groupid="timers" > 

   <comment> Handle timer elapsed </comment> 
   <mask priority="0" 
         class="0xFFFF" 
         type="0xFFFF" GUID="00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00" /> 
    <filter priority="0" 
            class="65535" 
            type="25" GUID="00:01:02:03:04:05:06:07:08:09:0A:0B:0C:0D:0E:0F" /> 

    <action>0x70</action> 
    <param> 
      /srv/vscp/timefile;1;%isoboth: Timer with id=%event.data.int32[0] elapsed counter=%event.data.uint32[0]ms %lf </param> </row>

Here some info is just written to a file when the timer is started and when it elapses.   But if you want to send an event periodically instead or do other actions this is the way to do it.

You don’t have to give a variable nor a reload flag when you start a timer. If no variable is given (use ;;) it is just ignored. The reload value will be set to false as default  value, that is the timer will run only once. As the last parameter you can set the number of times the timer should reload before it should stop.  The full documentation is here and here.

One useful use of timers is to handle resend of events. The working is like this

Send the event you expect a reply event from another node.

  1. Create/start a timer that have  period equal to resend intervals for the event you want to send. The timer should  have true for autoloading and the number of autoloads set to the number of resend that are allowed.  You can trigger the creation of the timer  by make a DM entry that triggering on one of the reserved events for example,  CLASS1.LOCAL  or CLASS1.LABORATORY so that when you send this local event  the actual event will be sent (see next point)
  2. In the timer started event send  the event you want to send.
  3. When/If the expected reply  is received pause the timer.
  4. Now if the timer the timer stopped event is detected the reply wait timeout has expired so do timeout handling there by sending another local event or CLASS1.ERROR, Type = 32 Time out.

Can be used for much more of course. Just useful and simple.