New plugin pimatic-ethboard

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Hello everyone,

as many others I also took the christmas vacation to tinker a bit.

Some month ago I bought an ethernet board, with two relays from http://www.robot-electronics.co.uk to automatically switch my garden pump and a water walve.

I found that the relay works very stable, offers webserver access and also has android/ios apps to control, but the disturbing thing was, that I have to use another web-interface or app to control it, which additionally is far from beeing as cool as pimatic is.

As the boards also offer a tcp command interface I thought, this should be an easy thing to do with pimatic. After some testing with the different possibilities I decided that a plugin sending some simple tcp commands should be easy and is maybe a good starting point to begin development with coffeescript and for pimatic.

So, after some development effort I am proud to release my very first pimatic plugin for controlling the ethernet / wifi based boards from robot-electronics.

github: https://github.com/mplessing/pimatic-ethboard
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/pimatic-ethboard

There is a full set of boards available from the robot-electronics shop (mostly cheaper than the ebay sellers), which should all be supported out of the box with the EthRelay device my plugin is providing.

The boards provide volt free contact relay outputs with a current rating of up to 16Amp each at 250vac max. The module has to be powered from a 12vdc supply which can be regulated or unregulated. There is also the possibility to set a TCP password and to do pulsed switching for on and/or off state.

There are the following boards available:
ETH002 / WIFI 002 with two relays
ETH008 / WIFI 008 with eight relays
ETH484 / WIFI 484 with four relays, 8 digitial switching I/Os and 4 analog inputs
ETH8020 / WIFI 8020 with twenty relays and 8 analog inputs

For a reference of my test-board have a look here: http://www.robot-electronics.co.uk/htm/eth002tech.htm

Plugin configuration example:

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

Device config example:

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

The digital switching I/Os are of type open collector and have a 10k resistor. Beside their normal I/O functionallity these digital switching I/Os can be configured (not with the plugin, but from the webinterface) to switch remote relays automagically (by tcp).
So you can create a relay network with these relays, all controlled by a single board.

The analog inputs are either from 0-3.3V or from 0-5V (depends on version) and have a resolution of 10 bits.

Unfortunatelly I do not yet support the digital switching I/Os and the analog inputs, because I only had an ETH002 at hand for development. Maybe I will head for a 484-board to implement the rest of the possible features

l also had the idea to create some type of tcp interface for my ESP8266s, which are lying around here … maybe there is also something to come.

Well, feel free to give me hints where I’m doing really stupid things, as I really have zero experience with javascript and coffeescript.

Hopefully some of you may find this plugin useful!

Best regards,

Markus

@Markus-Plessing
very nice! thx for your efforts!
I’ll stay tuned for your news

Hello guys,

want to share some new informations with you.

As robotelectronics seems not very responsive on my requests if I may get some support in terms of development hardware or at least some discount on a 484 device I decided to start development of the analog sensor and the digital IOs depending on the specifications.

Yesterday I’ve released version 0.0.7. The most important change is the introduction of a command FIFO, to make the sending and receiving of commands much more stable.

Additionally I’ve added support for the analog sensor, which can handle responses of 2 byte values. Normally the values have a 10bit resolution on a current of 0-3.3V or 0-5V. To get the valid current and the number of supported devices I’ve added a device recognition funtionallity.

To get the most out of this, I’ve started to implement also a generic analog sensor device with configurable range and resolution. Well, this will take some time unfortunately. Until this is released a generic device can simply respond with a device type already supported. First type is the Eth, second the Wifi.

Type 18,26 Analog: 0 Digital 0 Relay 2 AnalogMultiplier: 1.0
Type 19,28 Analog: 0 Digital 0 Relay 8 AnalogMultiplier: 1.0
Type 20,22 Analog: 4 Digital 8 Relay 4 AnalogMultiplier: 3.3@10bit
Type 21,24 Analog: 8 Digital 0 Relay 20 AnalogMultiplier: 5.0@10bit

I have made some mistakes naming my plugin in the package.json when I first released the plugin to npm. This was corrected with version 0.0.4. I will unpublish the versions up to version 0.0.3 as this module on npm is not updated any more.

I have not this much time, but will keep you updated

Best regards

Markus

Hi there,

At the moment my approach only supports one destination with multiple devices. So, I’m currently thinking of a concept on how to support multiple boards.

I think of moving the destination (host, port) from the plugin to the device entities. To keep the config small I want to assign an array of supported device_ids to each device type instead of cluttering the config with almost equal devices.

I like that the connection is handled by the plugin and not by every device, so I thought of keeping that approach.

Any opinions or suggestions?

Best regards,

Markus

Hi Markus,

Is this plugin also working for the wifi 4-relay module ?

@tvleminc Yes this should work out of the box at least for the relays. Well, protocol is the same for eth and wifi.

Keep in mind that iff you choose the wifi484, the analog feature is only implemented after specs, but not tested on real hardware and unfortunately the digital io thing is not yet done completely .

Do you think of buying one or do you already have the hw at hand?

Regards Markus

I’m considering buying one…but I’m still in doubt between a 433Mhz link or wifi link with my garden controller.

@tvleminc said:

wifi or 433mhz

You will find much cheap 433mhz components, but you will need also extra receiver hardware for pimatic. The range and reliability is most of the time more or less bad.

Wifi components are costly if not self-made, but has much more range coverage and at least the communication itself is more reliable.

Personally, I would always prefer 2.4 GHz (wifi, mysensors) over 433mhz and 868mhz.

Best regards

Markus