I thought I ought to do a short update of how things move forward. Well, despite me working all time I possibly can find with the new version of VSCP & Friends I still just move very slowly forward. On the positive side is of course that I write “forward” and not “backward”, but I feel things are moving very slowly ahead right now. But it is just a lot to do and I am only one person. You bet I have wet dreams about having a team of programmers working on this.
Tables
My current work is on the new “tables” that will use a database. Reachable from all interfaces (tcp/ip, mqtt, rest, websockets) they allow for a way to collect and fetch series of measurements as the old ones did. Different this time is that Sqlite3 is used as the storage engine and that they are a lot more flexible than they where before.
The goal with tables is to be able to drag a decision matrix element in place that collect the data form a device. You have to do that manually today. And on the other end drag a live diagram/table to a web page that display the content in the table.
Anyway if all goes well I hope the full table functionality is fully in place in two weeks or so.
Discovery
Discovery is the next task. Today one can listen on the multi-cast channel for new devices that are discovered. This will be developed further so that more information about a node is published. This means that with discovery the VSCP daemon itself will go out and fetch data from nodes that it discovers. The VSCP daemon will also download and cache MDF’s.
Also new is that discovery data will be stored in a database and this data can be fetched and investigated through the different interfaces (tcp/ip, mqtt, rest, websockets). In this database it will be possible to assign a real text name to a node and this name will in the future be possible to use when one refer to a node instead of using it’s GUID.
Lastly I hope to make a push interface to this discovery mechanism so that a VSCP aware phone for example can start an app. when a new device is discovered.
Hopefully in place before the summer. But don’t hold your breath.
Next release
The reason why I hold the next release of VSCP & Friends is that I the database structures aren’t final yet, and they will not be final until the interfacing code is in place. That is mainly the web interface code as of today, but also VSCP Works. If I release before the database structures is final I have to write update code between releases and that takes time I don’t have. So this work has to take the time it takes.
For those of you that want to try the head code, please do. But be careful to delete database files when you rebuild the project (rm /srv/vscp/*sql3). The VSCP UX code now have a session window and variable handling and a few other functions in place and may be worth a try.
Community
It saddens me of course that VSCP has not been successful in the forming of a development community. Today we don’t even have an active test or discussion community. This is of course harder still from a developer perspective as endless hours of work from my end just appears to end up in /dev/null. But I still strongly feel that I will try to make the vision of a uniting system set up for soon seventeen years ago come to reality before I give this up. This year has been the hardest yet on this journey. and without all your kind donations I would not have been able to proceed at all. Thanks!
If someone out there share this passion or a tiny little tiny bit of it, take on some VSCP work. Web ux interface and bindings to different languages is probably the most important tasks at hand. But there are so much more.
Have fun!
/Ake