Just a short info about what is brewing in the VSCP world.
Over the years that VSCP has existed it has been times with pretty good interest and times with very low-interest. This comes and goes and have done so many times. At the moment we are in a low period. Contributions to the project has never been very high even in periods of high interest, almost non existing in fact, and of course that is not better during a low period like this.
I have been working with this for so long now and coded a lot of code with other people’s needs in mind. Mostly broadcasting free stuff with a lot of effort behind it out in an empty space. It feels a bit awkward to continue that road ahead forever. As it feels now I will switch to do more “fun stuff” for my own needs instead of doing a general package for m2m/IoT in the future.
New drivers on the way
For my own projects I need some drivers for the Raspberry Pi and I therefore is building three Raspberry Pi specific drivers at the moment
vscpl2drv-rpigpio and vscpl2drv-rpigpio-if2
This is a driver that handle general GPIO on the Raspberry Pi (used pigpio/pigpiod). It can be programmed with a decision matrix so you can send for example CLASS1.CONTROL, TurnON/TurnOff event(s) to control specific I/O, PWM, Servo and frequency support is there. Also input monitoring. Event based and periodic. It comes in two versions one that uses thew pigpio lib and one that use the pigpiod server.
vscpl2drv-rpilcd
With this driver you can control a LCD connected to the Raspberry Pi by sending/trigger on VSCP events. parallel mode and I2C supported.
vscpl2drv-rpimax6675
Interface a MAX6675 for K thermocoupole temperature measurements.
The driver is build if –enable-rpi is used in the configure script. It will be a month or so before they is officially released.
Abandon wxWidgets
I have decided to leave wxWidgets for future work. This affects all components except VSCP works. Expect this to take a year or two before it is completed. The new drivers mentioned above already have this change in them.
XML configuration
For the future all Level II drivers will use a XML variable for configuration. This is true for the drivers mentioned above and will be for all current drivers as well. The old variable model will still be there for backward compatibility.
Bluetooth mesh
I have used a lot of money to collect Bluetooth mesh capable hardware for some time. And this winter will be used for work with these. VSCP is very well suited for Bluetooth mesh. I can’t almost wait before I can start this work. Excited!
OK that’s all for now folks.
4 replies on “State of VSCP”
Bye wxWidgets and welcome STL 😉
I spent the last evenings to take a look into reactjs. After I didn’t get warm with it somehow I spent some more days with vuejs. This looks promising and after moving forward and away from easy examples to a bigger application, it looks more and more like angularjs, but without typescript. *LOL*
But this is only the viewpoint of a javascript rookie. 🙂
Anyway building such a application in the future could be also the successor for vscpWorks. But who knows …
> C++11
Yes it’s a bit awkward but sticking to c++11 appears reasonable. You will ses vscp2_…. method doublets for some time all over the place… 😉 What do you think, right move/wrong move?
> web-based…
Yes that is definitively a way to go (from the point of someone that does not want to reach rookie leve in that area). Especially if on think node.js + browser. But I don’t know how to handle drivers in that case (common).
I think it is the right way to move. It will reduce the dependency to wxWidgets and maybe to other 3rd party libs too. Makes e.g. the daemon easier to maintain and for the users easier to install.
The nodejs approach is very interesting. I guess drivers (written in C/C++) can be integrated via add-on interface. But my knowledge here is very limited.
Good
The best web app I have seen so far is Etcher. Works like charm an dis cross platform. They use Electron which looks interesting. It’s harder to choose your tools in this area than to do the actual work. 😉