{"id":2316,"date":"2017-03-16T17:40:56","date_gmt":"2017-03-16T17:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/grodansparadis.com\/wordpress\/?p=2316"},"modified":"2017-03-16T17:40:56","modified_gmt":"2017-03-16T17:40:56","slug":"vscp-register-abstraction-model-vscp-ram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grodansparadis.com\/wordpress\/?p=2316","title":{"rendered":"#VSCP Register Abstraction Model (VSCP-RAM)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The single most important part of a VSCP system is the Register Abstraction Model<\/a>.\u00a0 With it you can describe anything that are real (or even not real) in this universe.\u00a0 Quite a piece of a powerful super tool to have in your arsenal.<\/p>\n

In the IoT world people often say that MQTT,\u00a0 CoAP,\u00a0 etc is IoT servers\/protocols. For me they are transport mechanisms. Good ones, at least in the case of MQTT.\u00a0 Useful for IoT? Yes. But IoT severs no?<\/p>\n

Now what!?<\/p>\n

To explain my point. Look at a web server. It serve content using the HTTP protocol. Simple enough. Works good. Quite similar to MQTT in fact.<\/p>\n

But…<\/p>\n

this was not the reason the world-wide web was a success.\u00a0 If everyone started to serve different non standardized content with the http protocol it would have been a mess of it all. Very hard to cope with for the web readers at least.\u00a0 Yes, it would have been useless. Well this was more or less the case also pre HTML.\u00a0 But what HTML did was to specify a common format for the content. That was the killer that made everything moving. Not the web server which is just the transport mechanism just as MQTT and others are in IoT.<\/p>\n

VSCP try to be more than a transport mechanism for m2m and IoT. A common way to look at and handle “things”.\u00a0 (yes MQTT can transport it just as CoAP and others can)<\/p>\n

In the picture above is a view on how VSCP look at a “thing<\/strong>“.\u00a0 A “thing<\/strong>“can be a TV,\u00a0 a refrigerator,\u00a0 a car,\u00a0 a lamp,\u00a0 a human or whatever. Everything can be described in this way. Yes, everything<\/strong>. Hardware as well as software or a some abstract non existing life form. ANYTHING<\/strong> is the world.<\/p>\n

To describe anything<\/strong> is of course not a problem. One just describe the anything<\/strong> in a way that comes up in one’s mind. So if we ask 999 people to describe the anything<\/strong> object there will be 999 different descriptions. That is actually OK. The problem is rather that there will be 999 different ways to interpret the descriptions of the anything.<\/strong> Hard work.<\/p>\n

If we instead came up with a common way to look at the anything<\/strong>,\u00a0 an abstraction of it,\u00a0 we could all use that abstraction to describe every the anything<\/strong> and after that we do not need to come up with so many new ways to interpret the descriptions nor ways to interact with the anythings<\/strong> of the world. We could even use this abstraction on top of any of the 999 description from above as it is useful for describing anything<\/strong>. Good if we love our “description” and don’t want to throw away our lovely description and interpretation of it.<\/p>\n

Of course, the abstraction would be most useful if it was available for a high-end system or user as well as for low-end system or user.\u00a0 Low end can actually be really\u00a0 low-end.\u00a0 So we better start there.\u00a0 But a high-end user or system demands handling of great complex things so we need to take this into account as well.<\/p>\n

VSCP solve this in the following way<\/p>\n