I have been playing around with OpenThead for about a month and I have set up two TI CC2538s in an OpenThread network, currently, I can send pings between them and modify the network parameters using the CLI, but they aren't capable of much else.
I would like to develop an application for them that is capable of transmitting some form of data using the OpenThread stack, maybe something simple at first like transmitting a block of text, however, I am not really sure where to start with this, are there any example applications that I could use as a starting point?
For application layers that sit directly on top of OpenThread, Nordic has released some examples in their nRF5 SDK for Thread.
Also note that Thread (and OpenThread) implement an IPv6 link capable of transporting vanilla IPv6 datagrams. As a result, you could run other transport protocols like TCP. However, UDP is often recommended due to relatively high loss rates and latency variance that is common to low-power, wireless mesh networks.
Related
I'm trying to interface a board level USB camera with a STM32 family microcontroller and send the image file to a central computer using CANbus. Just want to know if this is possible/ has been done before and how involved a task it would be.
I worked at a company where we sent live (low-resolution infra-red) video streams over CAN, but towards the end of my time there they shifted towards ethernet.
So it is possible, but certainly not what it is best suited for. The main advantages of CAN are that it is a multi-point, multi-master bus with built in arbitration. It is meant for short packets, typically 8 bytes (CAN FD allows you to increase that).
If your camera is USB, why not just get a USB repeater cable or USB-over-ethernet gateway?
If there is already a CAN network in place that you are piggy-backing onto then you need to consider what impact you will have on the existing traffic.
If you are starting from scratch then of course CAN will work but it would be an odd choice.
Depending on if its CAN or CANFD (Affects the maximum bulk transfer packet size) you have higher level protocol options to packetise your images and send them over canbus like any other block of data.
For just reguarlar CAN your after part of the standard called J1939.21 Data Link Layer, there are public versions of this floating around online, however due to the agreement when purchasing the standard, I am not able to share the specifics from what I have.
Its on pages 27-28 of the 2001 revision.
I'm trying to design an efficient communication protocol between a micro-controller on one side and an ARM processor on a multi-core TI chip on the other side through SPI.
The requirements for the needed protocol:
1 - Multi-session with queuing support, as I have multiple sending/receiving threads, so it will be more than one application using this communication protocol and I need the protocol to handle queuing these requests (I will keep holding the buffer if the transmission is queue but I just need the protocol to manage scheduling the queues).
2 - Works over SPI as an underlying protocol.
3 - Simple error checking.
In this thread: "Simple serial point-to-point communication protocol", PPP was a recommended option, however I see PPP does only part of the job.
I also found Light weight IP (LwIP) project featuring PPP over serial (which I assume that I can use it over SPI), so I thought about the possibility of utilizing any of the upper layers protocols like TCP/UDP to do the rest of the required jobs. Fortunately, I found TI including LwIP as part of their ethernet SW in the starterware package, which I assume to ease porting at least on the TI chip side.
So, my questions are:
1 - Is it valid to use LwIP for this communication scheme? Won't this introduce much overhead due to IP headers which are not necessary for a point to point (on the chip level) communication and kill the throughput?
2 - Will the TCP or any similar protocol residing in LwIP handle the queuing of transmission requests, for example if I request transmission through a socket while the communication channel is busy transmitting/receiving request for another socket (session) of another thread, will this be managed by the protocol stack? If so, which protocol layer manages it?
3 - Is their a more efficient protocol stack than LwIP, that meets the above requirements?
Update 1: More points to consider
1 - SPI is the only available option, I use it with available GPIOs to indicate to the master when the slave has data to send.
2 - The current implemented (non-standard) protocol uses DMA with SPI, and a message format of《STX_MsgID_length_payload_ETX》with a fixed message fragments length, however the main drawback of the current scheme is that the master waits for a response on the message (not fragment) before sending another one, which kills the throughput and does not utilise the full duplex nature of SPI.
3- An improvement to this point was to use a kind of mailbox for receiving fragments, so a long message can be interrupted by a higher priority one so that fragments of a single message can arrive non sequentially, but the problem is that this design lead to complicating things especially that I don't have much available resources for many buffers to use the mailbox approach on the controller (master) side. So I thought that it's like I'm re-inventing the wheel by designing a protocol stack for a simple point to point link which may not be efficient.
4- What kind of higher level protocols can be normally used above SPI to establish multiple sessions and solve the queuing/scheduling of messages?
Update 2: Another useful thread "A good serial communications protocol/stack for embedded devices?"
Update 3: I had a look at Modbus protocol, it seems to specify the application layer then directly the data link layer for serial line communication, which sounds to skip the unnecessary overhead of network oriented protocols layers.
Do you think this will be a better option than LwIP for the intended purpose? Also, is there a widely used open source implementation like LwIP but for Modbus?
I think that perhaps you are expecting too much of the humble SPI.
An SPI link is little more a pair of shift registers one in each node. The master selects a single node to connect to its SPI shift register. As it shifts in its data, the slave simultaneously shifts data out. Data is not exchanged unless the master explicitly clocks the data out. Efficient protocols on SPI involve the slave having something useful to output while the master inputs. This may be difficult to arrange, so you usually need a means of indicating null data.
PPP is useful when establishing a connection between two arbitrary endpoints, when the endpoints are fixed and known a priori, PPP would serve no purpose other than to complicate things unnecessarily.
SPI is not a very sophisticated nor flexible interface and probably unsuited to heavyweight general purpose protocols such as TCP/IP. Since "addressing" on SPI is performed by physical chip-select, the addressing inherent in such protocols is meaningless.
Flow control is also a problem with SPI. The master has no way of determining that the slave has copied the data from SPI the shift register before pushing more data. If your slave SPI supports DMA you would be wise to use it.
Either way I suggest that you develop something specific to your purpose. Since SPI is not a network as such, you only need a means to address threads on the selected node. This could be as simple as STX<thread ID><length><payload>ETX.
Added 27 September 2013 in response to comments
Generally SPI as its names suggests is used to connect to peripheral devices, and in that context the protocol is defined by the peripheral. EEPROMS for example typically use a common or at least compatible command interface across vendors, and SD/MMC card SPI interface uses a standardised command test and protocol.
Between two microcontrollers, I would imagine that most implementations are proprietary and application specific. Open protocols are designed for generic interoperability and to achieve that might impose significant unnecessary overhead for a closed system, unless perhaps the nodes were running a system that already had a network stack built in.
I would suggest that if you do want to use a generic network stack that you should abstract the SPI with device drivers at each end that give the SPI a standard I/O stream interface (open(), close(), read(), write() etc.), then you can use the higher-level PPP and TCP/IP protocols (although PPP can probably be avoided since the connection is permanent). However that would only be attractive if both nodes already supported these protocols (running Linux for example), otherwise it will be significant effort and code for little benefit, and would certainly not be "efficient".
I assume you dont really want or have room for a full ip (lwip) stack on the microcontroller? This just sounds like a lot of overkill. Why not just roll your own simple packet structure to move the data items you need to move. Depending on how spi is supported on both sides you may or may not be able to use it to define the frame for your data, if not a simple start pattern, length and a trailing checksum and maybe tail pattern would suffice for finding packet boundaries in the stream (no different than a serial/uart solution). You can even use the PPP solution for that with a start pattern and I think end pattern with the payload using a two byte pattern whenever the start pattern happens to show up in the data. I dont remember all the details now.
Whatever your frame is then add a packet type and your handshakes, or if the data is going to just be microcontroller to arm then you dont even need to do that.
To get back to your direct question. Yes, I think that an ip stack (lwip or other) will introduce a lot of overhead. both bandwidth and more important the amount of code needed to support that stack will chew up rom/ram on both sides. If you ultimately need to present this data in an ip fashion (a website hosted by the embedded system) then somewhere in the path you need an ip stack, etc.
I cant imagine that lwip manages your queues for you. I assume you would need to do that yourself. the various queues might want to talk to a single driver that deals with the single spi bus (assuming there is a single spi bus with multiple chip selects). It also depends on how you are using the spi interface, if you are allowing the arm to talk to multiple microcontrollers and the packets of data are broken up into a little bit from this controller a little from that controller so that nobody has to wait to long before they get a few more bytes of data. Or will a complete frame have to move from one microcontroller before moving onto the next gpio interrupt to pull that guys data? The long and short of it is I would assume you have to manage the shared resource just like you would in any other situation where you have multiple users of a shared resource (rtos, full blown operating system, etc). I dont remember lwip that well at all but with a full blown berkeley sockets application interface the user could write separate applications where each application only cared about one TCP or UDP port and the libraries and drivers managed separating those packets out to each application as well as all of the rules for the IP stack.
If you are not already doing experiments with moving data over the spi interface(s) I would start with simple experiments first just to get the feel for how well it is or isnt going to work, the sizes of transfers you can do reliably per spi transction, etc. Your solution may naturally just fall out of those experiments.
I's using Qt to build Udp and Tcp servers/clients. Now in recent project, Qt is not allowed and i'm supposed to use Boost. Having gone through boost::asio, i feel confused since there are so many features and usages are very different from Qt. For Udp (multicast,broadcast etc) i'm more or less clear now. But for Tcp i'm having problems understanding:
(have to do all async)
TCP is stream oriented so there is no way to know the number of bytes that have arrived. So we use asio::ip::tcp::socket::async_read_some(). However in Qt we have readAll() for a socket which can be made to read all data on readyRead() signal and return a QByteArray, the size of which we needn't specify as it can grow. How do i achieve this in Boost? readyRead() signal i think would map roughly to async_read_some(), what about the rest (readAll() and "growable" buffer/array?
disconnected() signal is emitted in Qt if the TCP connection disconnects (server/client off, lan cable unplugged etc). What would be the equivalent check in Boost? Do i need a timer to periodically send and expect heartbeat messages myself?
Use some overload of async_read free function with the appropriate completion-condition.
As you see there, this function accepts asio::streambuf, which is growing automatically.
Yes, the only portable & reliable way is to send some heartbeat. I don't know how Qt does that, but try cutting the network cable and see whether you get any notification from Qt...
I am looking at putting together a communications protocol for an embedded application, but I don't know much about high-level communications such as TCP/IP, etc. I'm more used to dealing with bits and bytes on I²C and SPI, etc.
Someone has suggested that I use a VISA (virtual instrument software architecture) I/O API with SCPI (standard commands for programmable instruments) command syntax. What layer would these sit at on the OSI model? I'm thinking VISA would be application and SCPI presentation?
Someone else has suggested using SSH, again as I'm not sure what layer VISA/SCPI sits at, I don't know how SSH would affect the design.
Since you're basically just using the network to pass data between a hardware API and an application, you're on layer 7(application) of the OSI stack.
I have a network application working on Linux. What I want to do is to make my application able to announce it's presence in LAN and then notify other applications about some changes. Because I don't know how many instances of my application already works on other hosts in LAN I cannot use SCTP, multicast communication is the only way (or maybe you know other solution?).
Structure I want to send over multicast address has fixed size (320 bytes) and contains binary data, which are in fact structure of numbers and bit flags.
I'm wondering if there are any well-know programming techniques, which can make UDP communication a bit more reliable. I only figured out two things:
I drop all packets received by recvmsg() which are smaller then 320 bytes.
I surround every packet with with well-know header and footer, and then check them each time when I receive new message, however packet still can be damaged somewhere in the middle right?
Edit:
I found a PGN protocol, but the only Linux implementation is known to work on x86. It's partial solution for me, because I want to run my program on ARM architecture too
You can try porting PGM to ARM, there are not that many requirements in OpenPGM, it already runs fine on IBM s390 mainframes for example.
Disclosure: I'm the author of OpenPGM \:D/