ad-hoc network for pimatic necessary ? - Update: Proof of Concept working

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bump

How can we take this a step further ? I accomplished running pimatic on my NAS, giving me some more flexibility. Right now I can create a psudo TTY on the VM and connect it to the ESP. Pimatic starts and thinks it is connected to a Arduino over USB but in fact it’s talking to a ESP over TCP.
For now I will power up this test environment to see how stable a connection between these two will be.

creating pimatic plugins is out of my league , but in the end we should need some modifications on homeduino or a other plugin.
Just a simple reconnect from homeduino would be a big step forward instead of saying connection is lost and give up.
Who wants to help?

I guess it would be a lot easier if the plugin could directly connect via TCP instead of emulating a USB -> serial -> TCP bridge?

Yes, that would be the best option, but for me not dooable due to lack of experience.
Technicaly it’s not a USB convertion. What I do is creating a extra TTY directy to TCP. I can start that what one single command.
I noticed that the homduino plugin did try to reconnect on lost connection, but socat doesn’t. If I can get socat to re-establish a connection, and homeduino does the same, then it should work without any problem - for now

I have been thinking about this, and I think this would be a good approach:

Extend current homduino plugin with NPM telnet-client support. Add a extra driver option:

{
  "plugin": "homeduino",
  "driver": "telnet",
  "driverOptions":
  {
    "ip": "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx",
    "port": 23
   },
  "transmitterPin": 4
}

Extend all the RF devices with an extra optional transmitter parameter:

{
  "id": "rfswitch",
  "name": "RFSwitch",
  "class": "HomeduinoRFSwitch",
  "protocols": [{
    "name": "switch1",
    "options": {
      "id": 42,
      "unit": 0
    },
  "transmitter": "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:
  }]
}

When loading homeduino it will read the telnet driver options. Every RF device that needs to be transmitted will be send to the IP adres/port in the plugin config.
When a RF device has the optional ‘transmitter’ paramter, that specific device will be send to that IP address.
This will give you the option to send all telnet traffic to a dedicated ESP. When needed you overrule some devices to be sent to a other ESP.
When talking from homeduino to ESP you could keep it really simple. Perhaps first a “ready?” <-> “ready!” exchange and after that the same payload as serial homeduino: “RF send transmitter_pin repeats buckets sequence” (so the pimatic part of the plugin will be telling the ESP what pin to use, could be overruled on ESP side).

Receiving of RF can be done by all the same ESP’s in the network, they can send the protocol info over the homeduino HTTP API, no need to contact over telnet.
(later pergaps some black and whitelisting on the ESP side to avoid multiple transmits for the same protocol detection).

Only downside for this way is loosing some wired sensors directly connected to the homeduino, but I guess that’s the same for the GPIO driver and no one would see this as a problem when playing with ESP’s.

I hvae looked on how the homeduino plugin is build, but (I repeat myself) it is way above my skills. I need someone to join this journey so we can build a entire RF to wifi network with multiple nodes.

We don’t need to remove the local driver system. I would simple add the possibility to define “Nodes” in the plugin config with an name and ip Adress.

In every protocol definition you can define in an array on which node it should be send.

As communitation I think it should something like html post or equal easy to implement
A json object like this via a post call is my idea.

{
  "buckets": [a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h],
  "timings": "04513101020540040220050",
  "repeats": 7 
} 

The RFControl setup must already be in the esp8266.

Good one, HTTP would be an easier option, but there should be a plugin-wide setting for the IP address of the ESP to contact, Adding one or more different IP’s to a specific device should be optional.

I can do the ESP part, if someone can help with the homduino plugin part.

So whats the current status for this ? @koffienl @Icesory ?