Re: Taking the red pill...
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Jun 17, 2021
- 2506 views
Same as it was in the early 1990's: examine, monitor, log the "real world", and be able to program decisions to respond. For example: it's smokey outside, so close the windows. Per a conversation on irc last night, i am not the only one needing this particular rule.
In terms of "old style", wire the sensors to the user port of an olde Commodore, and peek/poke the port. Or wire up a couple 74xx688 chips and a 74xx245, and plug that into the expansion port, and peek/poke it. Or get complicated and use a serial port. Unfortunately, this still doesn't get the data into a modern computer and the benefits it could provide. And the olde computers are not lasting forever.
I'm confident you can accomplish all of this with modern and inexpensive hardware, but like any other enthusiast community, it's grown significantly in the past 30-40 years. It's not that the options are bad, just that there are a lot more options and it's hard to wade through all the noise if you're coming into this without having watched it develop in real time. We've basically got two major categories of devices to work with: programmable microcontrollers like Arduino, Teensy, and the new Raspberry Pi Pico, and system-on-a-chip computers like Raspberry Pi, NanoPi, and Pine64. And yes, those SoC boards typically run Linux. Some can run an embedded "IoT" version of Windows 10 but that's its own complicated ball of wax that I wouldn't recommend.
The devices you first posted use RS-485 but that's not natively supported on most of these boards. However there are plenty of options that utilize the wire protocols that are available, like UART, I2C, or SPI. And there are plenty devices that may utilize various protocols underneath (like RS-485), but they might also come packaged into a "hat" or "shield" which is a pre-made and easier-to-use device that packages the raw chips and circuits with something that will work natively with the microcontroller board. Someone might have already combined that Ethernet device with an RS-485 to UART adapter and baked it all into a board that plugs into the top of an Arduino, and now you've got an Ethernet Shield, which also happens to include a microSD card reader.
The Arduino boards are the de facto standard for making "things" that do "stuff" and interact with the real world. So using your example of monitoring for smoke, here's a project that uses an Arduino board for Smoke Detection using MQ-2 Gas Sensor. Combine that with Send Email with ESP8266 and Arduino or Add push notifications to your hardware and now you've at least got something that will tell you "hey it's smokey outside!" You could get super fancy and combine that with a few contact sensors and a motor controller and have it actually close your windows via Control a Large Linear Actuator With Arduino.
Getting back to part of your original question though: does any of this use Euphoria? Not really, no. You can run Euphoria on Linux a Raspberry Pi and then interface with its GPIO pins directly via the kernel or using the wiringPi library (which is now dead, unfortunately). For Arduino and other microcontrollers, somebody would have to make a Euphoria assembler to directly output the AVR instruction set binaries that you could then load into the chip. The Arduino IDE uses a "flavor" of not-quite-C. I think the Raspberry Pi Pico uses MicroPython but I haven't experimented with any of that yet.
-Greg
