pimatic-ethboard

Plugin to control ethernet/wifi devices by tcp/ip commands. Protocol is as defined for boards from - http://www.robot-electronics.co.uk.

There are different boards with a combination of the following onboard devices:

• Relays (16A @ 24VDC / 230VAC)
• Digital switching I/Os (NPN OC transistor with 10k)
• Analog inputs (0-3,3V or 0-5V with 10 bits resolution)

This plugin is only for controlling and not for configuring the devices.

Note, this is an early version of the plugin provided for testing purposes. Please provide feedback via github.

Supported devices

Basically every device which respects the protocol used for communicating is supported. Base of development are the ethernet/wifi devices from robot-electronics.

robot-electronic ethernet/wifi devices have three numbers at the end of the device name giving the amount of the different supported devices by the board. The left number is the amount of analog inputs, the middle number represents the number of digital switching I/Os and the right number gives the number of relays.

There are the following standard devices available: ETH002, ETH008, ETH484, ETH8020 WIFI002, WIFI008, WIFI484, WIFI0820

Protocol description

Action	Command	Response
Get hardware id	0x10	3 byte HW ident
Set device active	0x20 devId pulseTime	1 byte, 0=success 1=failure
Set device inactive	0x21 devId pulseTime	1 byte, 0=success 1=failure
Get device states	0x24	1 bit per device, min 1 byte per type [Relays,DigitalIOs]
Get analog value	0x32 devId	2 bytes integer value (high byte first)
Send auth string	0x79 pwdBytes	1 byte, 1=auth ok 2=failure
Get auth state	0x7A	1 byte, 0=locked, 1-XX=auth timer 0xFF=disabled
Set auth locked	0x7B	no response

Restrictions

Currently only the relay feature of an ETH002 is implemented and tested. The relay feature of the other boards should work out of the box. Additionally I've implemented the analog value feature with respect to the specifications.

Configuration

You can load the plugin by editing your config.json to include the following in the plugins section. The properties host and port are used to connect to the board. If you set a TCP password in the board configuration also set this password here. The property pingInterval specifies the time interval in seconds for updating the data set. For debugging purposes you may set property debug to true. This will write additional debug messages to the pimatic log. The values set in the example config afterwards represent also the default values.

{
      "plugin": "ethboard",
      "host": "192.168.0.200",
      "port": 17498,
      "pingInterval": 60,
      "password": ""
      "debug": false
},

Then you need to add a device in the devices section. Currently, only the following device types are supported:

• EthRelay: This type is able to switch a relay and display its current state.
• EthAnalogSensor: This type is able to provide analog values with a resolution of 10bit

As part of the device definition you need to provide the deviceid, which is the device number on the board. For relays you can also specify a pulseTime, where each increment counts as 100ms. If pulseTime expires the relay state will toggle back, while pulseType is one of ["none", "on", "off", "both"], what configures the states for which the pulseTimer will be activated.

{
      "id": "ethrelay01",
      "class": "EthRelay",
      "name": "Ethernet Relay 01",
      "deviceid": 1,
      "pulseType": "none",
      "pulseTime": 0
},
{
      "id": "ethanalog01",
      "class": "EthAnalogSensor",
      "name": "Ethernet Analog Sensor 01",
      "deviceid": 1
}

Contributions

Contributions to the project are welcome. You can simply fork the project and create a pull request with your contribution to start with.

History

• 20160106, V0.0.1
  • Initial Version
• 20160107, V0.0.2
  • Updated typos in readme
• 20160107, V0.0.3
  • Synch version of git and npm
• 20160112, V0.0.4
  • Added protocol info to README
  • fixed some typos in README and package.json
• 20160112, V0.0.5
  • Fixed protocol table
• 20160213, V0.0.6
  • Improved the JS test server
• 20160213, V0.0.7
  • Improved command handling with FIFO
  • Added board type detection
  • Added analog sensor device
• 20160416, V0.0.8
  • Fixed typo in README.md
  • Plugin supported by pimatic 0.9 (thanks @mwittig)
• 20160502, V0.0.9
  • Added device destroy method for pimatic 0.9 support