openbalena

@mention let's continue our discussion about openBalena here. This discussion start to be really interesting!

I never used openBalena so I'm not really comfortable with it.

I think Luos could be a block and all the other one could use it to exchange informations with others.

The first question I have is are there other ways to interface with Luos than USB? For example: I2C?

Natively Luos use half duplex connection as network.

The USB is used to control a Luos network trough a computer.

I think you will ahve a better understanding with this demo : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHHBjfBDEY&t=165s&abchannel=Luos

perhaps you already watched it…

Yes, I already watched the demo 🙂
It was actually all the demos that got me hooked.

But if I understand correctly PC <-> Luos is over USB. Is this always the case or are there different options available to facilitate this M2M communication? I suspect PyLuos for example just emulates another device in the Luos network?

To be honest USB is massively used and we don't have other example available yet.

But Pyluos is already compatible with websocket.

So wifi or ethernet could work.

the only thing you have to change is the Pipe driver. Pipe allow any service on the network to send and receive information from any external communication way.

You you make a BLE Pipe or anything this will work.

Although I'd imagine writing an I2C driver might be a little tricker of a wrapper for Robus, right? Because there's limits on sending, you'd have to emulate an I2C address for the data, and isn't there a length limit for each address? (Been a while since I dug into the protocol side vs just using it)

You'd need one as a flag, unique on the I2C network for each node as a sort of 'flag' to swap out the chunk of data being read at a different unique address, with the next part of the string Robus generates (same for BLE, I'd think? Or just the attribute based Bluetooth)

Ah wait no it doesn't have a limit on data length that's just Bluetooth -

But still would need a unique address for each node

Ble has a 20byte limit

So that method I mentioned for I2C isn't needed, but might work for BLE 🙃

(I too have been making wrappers for protocols - Bluetooth serial is much easier 😅 )

NRF24 also has limitations on message size depending on a few variables so perhaps a dynamic wrapper/message chunker isn't a bad idea though

For I2C to avoid dealing with unique address we could use broadcast instead.

This is a hack but it could work on most of the hardware…

Wouldn't be so great in a multi-node network

Although some MCUs have multiple I2C lines, right?

yes probably.

Basically we have the same thing using serial every messages are broadcasted.

But we could optimise it a lot using ID for sure…

True, true - maybe no need for multiple IDs anyway, seeing you can't send data to multiple different addresses over the same line at once anyway

So it's like serial in that aspect anyway

Only thing non-broadcast does is save cycles in processing/filtering irrelevant data for each node not targeted.

yes exactly.
Also we could use the acknowledgement feature of I2C.

ACK is the trickiest part of Robus because it's extremely time constrained…

anyway we are drifting, this thread is about OpenBalena 😉

The reason I ask it is that we’ve noticed the USB ports sometimes wear out causing all sorts of issues. But I suppose using a cm4 for example the usb bud can just be routed over the pcb.

I think USB is pretty good to wear out, but you could use industrial connection instead…