Categories
State of things

State of VSCP

The thought was that I would do the 13.1.0 release today. But I have to postpone this until after my summer vacation. Well it to should have started today, but it also is postponed until Tuesday. But then I will be four weeks away from the computers and the  bugs. It is very warm and dry in Sweden now, and has been so since May,  and actually an office is NOT the place to be.

I work with a full Debian package for VSCP at the moment. It is a lot of rules. A lot of info to take in. A lot of things to add and change. After this is finished I will hopefully manage to get a sponsor/mentor at Debian and after that VSCP can enter in the golden path of Debian distribution, meaning much simpler installation and update for all in the future.

So I will silence for a while from now on so don’t expect rapid replies and fixes during this time. Hopefully I will come back after the vacation with a lot of new energy.

Have fun!

Categories
ESP32

A Cheaper Single-Core ESP32 Module? – Hackster Blog

The single-core ESP32-S0WD finally has a module to call its own

Source: A Cheaper Single-Core ESP32 Module? – Hackster Blog

Categories
Raspberry Pi

RPI3-MODBP-POE – RASPBERRY-PI – Tilläggskort, PoE (Power over Etherne) HAT för Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

Buy RPI3-MODBP-POE – RASPBERRY-PI – Tilläggskort, PoE (Power over Etherne) HAT för Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ at Farnell element14 Sverige. order RPI3-MODBP-POE now! great prices with fast delivery on RASPBERRY-PI products.

Source: RPI3-MODBP-POE – RASPBERRY-PI – Tilläggskort, PoE (Power over Etherne) HAT för Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

Categories
ESP32

New powerful WiFi+BT/BLE module to hit the market soon.

Categories
Bluetooth

$10 Nordic Semi nRF52840 USB Dongle Supports Bluetooth 5, Thread, ZigBee, 802.15.4, ANT and 2.4GHz Proprietary

Several weeks ago, as I noticed the lack of Bluetooth 5 USB dongles, I found MakerSpot CC2640 Bluetooth 5 USB stick based on Texas Instrument CC2640R2F

Source: $10 Nordic Semi nRF52840 USB Dongle Supports Bluetooth 5, Thread, ZigBee, 802.15.4, ANT and 2.4GHz Proprietary

Categories
VSCP

VSCP Events

VSCP event files and docs now is auto generated.  The docs for the scripts that generate the misc. file is here if you are interested.

Updated files will be available here https://www.vscp.org/events/ The docs sub folder here contains event documentation in markdown and also a zip and a tar of all content. This information is generated for the VSCP specification document.

All files generated contains version information which is the date and time when the docs was generated. This information is embedded in the generated files (if possible) and also available in JSON form here (version.json) and in JSONP form here (version.jsonp). In automated processes compare the on-site version information in one of there file with the downloaded version and download a new version if a newer one is available.

C header files are are here for event classes (vscp_class.h) and here for event types (vscp_type.h). The files are automatically included in the vscp and the vscp-firmware packages.

Python VSCP event include files are here for VSCP classes (vscp_class.py) and here for vscp types (vscp_type.py). The files are automatically included in the pyvscp package.

The vscp_hashclass.h and vscp_hashtype.h files are headers for the vscp helper class.

For JavaScript VSCP events are available in JSON format (vscp_events.json) and in JSONP format (vscp_events.jsonp).

vscp_class.js and vscp_type.js holds VSCP class and VSCP type information suitable for JavaScript.

XML format is available here (vscp_events.xml).

SQL format is available here (vscp_events.sql).

 

Categories
General

WMF18 Call for Makers – Maker Faire

The Greatest Show (& Tell) on Earth. Maker Faire is part science fair, part county fair, and part something entirely new! As a celebration of the Maker Movement, it’s a family-friendly showcase of invention, creativity, and resourcefulness.

Source: WMF18 Call for Makers – Maker Faire

Categories
General

The EU Innovation ranking is flawed

in the Swedish innovation system, there is a lot of investment in innovation inputs, but these are not transformed into innovation outputs. This is not high performance. Such inefficiencies should be the point of departure for the design of innovation policy in Sweden – not the widespread SII-based misbelief that Sweden is number 1 in terms of innovation performance in the EU.

Source: The EU Innovation ranking is flawed – Charles Edquist

Categories
State of things VSCP

State of #VSCP

It’ been quiet on all VSCP fronts for a while.  Well VSCP is anyway probably the least written about project in the world in relation to time alive and efforts put into it. And that is OK as long as things move forward (and they do – slowly).

We approach 18 years of VSCP now in August. I never could see that coming when I started this project.  I think I have worked almost daily during this time on the project. Crazy if you think about it.

A lot of other projects has emerged (and died) now with the buzz of IoT.  It’s a bit like waves of knowledge coming to people unused to embedded development who never ask questions to people that has been into embedded development for ages. First everything  should connect to the cloud, then people realised that that was not the best solution, it was impossible to realize actually,  border routers was introduced, we called them (home) gateways before, then web standards where abandoned for binary protocols and so on. Soon someone will realize that things will we both wireless and connected with cables and that small devices really have limited resources and then we probably end up in something like what VSCP has been about all the time. Well, it’s the way things work in our industry. Hype, hype, hype. Happy, happy, sad.

Here is the current state.

TSL/SSL

OK VSCP. Changes has been made to the VSCP daemon. The mongoose tcp/ip code is on the way out and is replaced with some code derived from the Civetweb project.  A fun thing is that this derived code is also the ancestor to the Mongoose code to. Good thing is that now all the VSCP Daemon code will be MIT licensed.  Freedom for you.

The derived code is published as a separate project sockettcp (still needs to be documented) and this is code that makes it easy to code tcp clients/servers that use TSL/SSL or unsecure connections. Works on Windows and Linux.

The VSCP Daemon tcp/ip interface will therefore be fully TLS/SSL from the next version.

Encryption will also be introduced in another layer to both the winsock and the tcp/ip interfaces. Much like what is available today in the multicast and UDP interfaces. This makes it possible for clients that don’t have the ower to use full TSL/SSL to still implement secure connections.

VSCP Daemon

Yes I changed the name to “VSCP Server” for a while. Just like “VSCP Dameon” better. so I changed back. Probably will use the term  “Border Router” for this piece of software more in the future.

Documentation

Most if the documentation (still some work left to do on VSCP Works) has now been moved to Markdown and is available on Gitbook (old paths work). Docs are licensed under Creative Commons BY 4.0 now. Search and pdf/ebook availabilities is the good things that come with this change. Source for the docs are available on Github (vscp-doc-….) and it is now easy to post corrections and changes as for all Git projects.

Specs

To add classes and types has been something that has been getting harder and harder over time. The defines for them are all over the place. A change/addition means editing all these places. This has been changed now so all files are auto-generated including the class/type part of the VSCP spec. JSON/XML/sql… and other formats will be available soon for dynamic downloads.

Well there is a lot more changes in the code and it will all be included in the next release that will be available later this summer.

Snap

VSCP will use the snap package system. Easy install. Easy use. Debian packages is still in the pipeline to.

Help

I will not ask directly for help here any more. It’s been a useless question to ask all times I tried (many now… 😉 ). That is OK.  If you been hanging around the project you know you are welcome to contribute. The ever growing todo list is here.

That’s all for now. Midsummer here tomorrow.  A day without any VSCP related work all together.

Have fun!
/Ake

Categories
General

(34) Getting Started with ESP32 Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) on Arduino IDE – YouTube