Tuesday, November 28, 2017

IOT- Mongoose OS

In preparing for another IoT project I came across Mongoose OS.  Mongoose OS describes itself as “an operating system for connected products” and is a product of Cesanta. It is open source and dual-licensed under the GPLv2 licenses and a Commercial License which removes the GPLv2 and functionality restrictions.

It supports the ESP32, ESP8266, CC3220, and CC3200.  I have been mostly using it with a nodemcu board but also have gotten several simple examples running on an Olimex mod-wifi-esp822-dev board

I have been working with it off and on for a few weeks and so far am impressed. 

I have put a couple of my examples on github in the hope that they will help others.

More to follow…

Saturday, February 4, 2017

Another Adventure with IOT - CallerID Project

Over the past year or so I have been looking for an IoT project.  Last summer I came up with one which was to capture caller id information and display it on our multiple computers around the house so we can see who is calling with out getting up and checking the phone.

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For the project I used the opensource Mosquitto MQTT Broker running on a Raspberry PI configured with self signed certificates.  I used TLS connections with usernames and password to secure communications between the nodes.

I captured the caller id using an old US Robotics Sportster modem connected to an original Raspberry PI Model B using a serial to USB adapter.  I started the project with the goal of working with Node.js but but had problems getting the node.js serial module running on the old Raspberry PI.  I switched over to a simple C program to capture the caller id information from the modem and publish it to the MQTT Broker.

So far I have built a Windows client which displays the caller id information using a notification from a tray icon.

The project took me a couple of months to get up and working.  This was in part due to having limited time to work on it and partly as I spent a good bit of time getting familiar with node.js.  I found Mosquitto very easy to use.  The documentation for Mosquitto and the Mosquitto API very good.

The setup has been running for several weeks now.  Both my wife and my computers have the CallerID Subscriber installed on them and we get notifications with caller id when calls come in.

One tool that I used extensively during the development process was mqtt-spy which I would recommend to anyone working with MQTT.