ulnoiot micropython

Attention, this is the retired version of ulnoiot which was based on micropython. For new features head to http://github.com/ulno/ulnoiot

All infomration here might be slightly outdated and not work. If you want to adopt thi sproject and continue it, feel free to adopt the original author ulno.

Introduction

ulnoiot (pronounced: "You'll know IoT") is a framework and environment for making it easy for everyone to explore and develop for the Internet of Things (IoT) -- easy for tinkerers, makers, programmers, hobbyists, students, and professionals alike. It has a special focus on education and is intended to support classes to teach Internet of Things (IoT) and home automation.

However, it also supports existing IoT deployments and brings mechanisms for over the air (OTA) updates and automatic multi-device deployment.

If you are impatient and want to dive into it right now, fast forward to Installation or First IoT Nodes.

ulnoiot is based on a multi-layered network architecture. This means for this project that each IoT-system (small network of connected sensors and actors) has its own gateway - usually running an MQTT-broker. These gateways can be connected to cloud resources, other cloud or Internet based MQTT brokers or interconnected among themselves. Security and privacy can be selectively controlled at each layer border (everywhere, where a gateway connects two layers). In a teaching context these gateways are usally based on a modified Raspbian running on a Raspberry Pi of a newer generation (wifi on board - both the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Raspberry Pi Zero W can be easily used as an ulnoiot gateway at this point) to allow them to work as wifi routers.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Architecture
• Supported Hardware
• Tool Support
• Installation
• First IoT Nodes
• External Resources
• Support
• Further Documentation

Architecture

ulnoiot System Architecture

In an ulnoiot system you find one or several ulnoiot gateways and wirelessly connected nodes with physically connected devices (sensors or actors).

An ulnoiot gateway contains and runs all the software needed to configure an IoT system. It also provides facilities to run and manage a wifi router as well as an MQTT-broker. It therefore provides configuration management software as well as dataflow management services.

Such a gateway can for example easily be installed on a Raspberry Pi 3. Nodes are wireless components which interact with physical obejcts. Usually a node has several devices attached to it. devices can be sensors (like a button or temperature, light, movement, or humidity sensor) or actors (like relais, solenoids, motors, or leds).

Supported Hardware

ulnoiot is targeted to run on a variety of (mainly Linux-based) hardware and on wireless microcontrollers (initially mainly esp8266-based microcontrollers and single-board Linux computers like the Raspberry Pi 3 or Raspberry Pi Zero W).

If you are interested in shopping for related hardware, check http://iot.ulno.net/hardware or go directly to AliExpress, Amazon, AdaFruit or Sparkfun and search for Wemos D1 Mini, ESP8266, NodeMCU, 37-in-1 Arduino sensor kit.

The gateway services have been tested to run on:

• Raspberry Pi 1 (B and B+), 2, 3, and Zero W
• Linux laptop running Ubuntu 17.04

We are trying to provide virtualbox images as soon as we find time and/or volunteers.

We are also working on verifying that ulniot works well on Orange-Pi Zero and the C.H.I.P. from NextThing to allow more cost-effective solutions to use ulnoiot.

Currently the following esp8266-based devices are supported:

• Wemos D1 Mini
• NodeMCU
• Espresso Lite V2
• Sonoff and Sonoff Touch
• There is an esp8266 generic opition for other esp8266-based boards.

The part of ulnoiot running on the esp8266 is an extension of micropython enabling IoT classes and easily getting started using micropython.

There has been some initial effort in creating a starter development kit for the Wemos D1 Mini - you can see more information here.

Tool support

ulnoiot includes a lot of small scripts to simplify a plethora of tasks supporting the deployment of a small IoT system or MQTT-based IoT environment. Among them are the following (most of these scripts are available after starting the ulnoiot command or executing run in the main ulnoiot directory):

• run/ulnoiot: enter or run a command in the ulnoiot-environment (setting system variables and virtual python environments). To run a command, prefix it by the exec keyword, i.e.: ulnoiot exec accesspoint

• accesspoint: start an accesspoint on a free wifi interface

• ulnoiot upgrade: get latest version of ulnoiot (inside an existing version)

• shell: starting mpfshell to connect to locally or network connected esp8266 device

• install: (re-)install the ulnoiot environment (if you specify clean, it re-installs)

• network based commands:

  • console: (determines destination via the directory you are in) open a console to the respective node (the one configured with the local directory)
  • initialize: initialize a current node including a serial flash
  • flash: firmware update over the network (OTA) of the currently selected configuration folder (or all it's configuration sub-folders)
  • update: update ulnoiot micropython user-mode (non firmware) extensions over the network of the currently selected configuration folder (or all it's configuration sub-folders)
  • deploy: update ulnoiot micropython node coniguration (non firmware) extensions over the network of the currently selected configuration folder (or all it's configuration sub-folders). If noupdate is specified as option, only update the node-specific files.

• serial connection based commands:

  • console_serial: connect via serial to a locally connected microcontroller
  • initialize: set up (flash, update, and deploy) an ulnoiot node for the first time
  • flash_serial: flash the ulnoiot-modified micropython on a locally connected

  esp8266

  • update_serial [alsodeploy]: copy or update the modifieable files for the ulnoiot environment to a locally or remotely connected wemosd1mini

Installation

There are two ways to get the ulnoiot configuration management software up and running:

1. Downloading and flashing a pre-prepared raspberry pi image to an sd card and running the gateway and configuration management software from there.
2. Setting up ulnoiot in your own Linux environment: Installation on Linux

Please also check out the tutorial videos for this setup on ulno's youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ulno.net+ulnoiot

Installation on Raspberry Pi from Pre-Prepared Image

Tutorial videos for setup:

• On MacOS
• On PC/Windows
• On Linux: Please follow the installation steps below (or file an issue to ask for specific Linux video).

Installation step by step:

• Download the Raspberry Pi image from here: https://goo.gl/bVgLMr

• Make sure the sha256-checksum of the image is correct. It should be:

  bd0383eb82bcd9fcf6e6ca83c6b34a524af8e6225065a8576da592cb91ecf0e7

  On Linux and MacOS, you can use sha256sum or shasum -a 256 to verify the image, on Windows you can use https://raylin.wordpress.com/downloads/md5-sha-1-checksum-utility/

• Write the image to a (at least) 8GB class-10 sd-card with https://etcher.io/ (works on Windows, MacOS, or Linux).

• Open the sd-card on your pc. You will see a file named config.txt Edit this file and scroll to the bottom. Change and uncomment the options uiot_ap_name and uiot_ap_password to your own values, remember the password you set in uiot_ap_password. This configures the pi as a wifi-router. Make sure that uiot_ap_password is longer than 8 characters.

  If you have another USB-wifi stick, and want to use Internet via WiFi connect this wifi stick to the pi and configure uiot_wifi_name, uiot_wifi_password, and uiot_wifi_user correspondingly to your WiFi network.

  If you have access to ethernet (for example a free ethernet lan port on your router), connect the Pi to this ethernet - no extra configuration is necessary for this.

• Put the sd-card into a Raspberry Pi 3 and power it up (you can also put it into a Raspberry Pi Zero W, however there are some advanced configuration options You need to use to make that work fluently).

• In Windows, install Moba xterm. On MacOS, make sure, you have iTerm2 and XQuartz installed. Linux will work out of the box.

• You should now see your ulnoiot wifi network as specified in uiot_ap_name. Connect your computer (laptop or desktop pc) to this wifi network (use the password set in uiot_ap_password). If everything was configured correctly you should still have internet on your computer.

• Connect to the ulnoiotgw via ssh. Make sure to enable X forwarding to have the clipboard working transparently.

  The command for Mac and Linux is:

  ssh -X pi@ulnoiotgw

  The command on Windows will be (and can be graphically configured in MobaSSH):

  ssh -X pi@192.168.12.1

  The default password for the user pi is ulnoiot

  Consider changing it immediately entering the command passwd

• Enter (and run = hit enter) the command ulnoiot upgrade to make sure that you have the latest version of ulnoiot.

• At one point, also make sure to run sudo raspi-config and chose to resize the hd in the advanced options.

• Check out the short tmux help, pressing the ctrl-key and a-key simultanously, releasing them and then pressing the h-key.

If you have trouble following this, make sure to checkout the tutorials on youtube.

you can now continue with First IoT Nodes

Installation on Linux

• install dependencies: sudo apt install git mc mosquitto mosquitto-clients virtualenv iptables bridge-utils
• disable the mosquitto server: sudo systemctl stop mosquitto; sudo systemctl disable mosquitto
• setup ulnoiot: clone this repository
  • If you just want read-only access just type in a folder of your choice: git clone https://github.com/ulno/ulnoiot
  • If you are a ulnoiot developer, use git clone git@github.com:ulno/ulnoiot
• make ulnoiot runnable -> copy examples/scripts/ulnoiot into your bin folder and adapt the path in it to reflect the location where you cloned ulnoiot. If you use tmux or byobu with bash consider sourcing lib/shell_starter/ulnoiot.bash in your .bashrc.
• start ulnoiot and agree and wait for dependencies to be downloaded (if packages are missing, fix dependencies and try to run ulnoiot install clean)
• After successfully entering ulnoiot (the prompt should have changed colors and show ulnoiot in red, white, and black), start configuring your first IoT node, see First IoT Nodes

First IoT Nodes

For this section, we assume that you have successfully set-up the ulnoiot configuration management environment.

• Consider to configure etc/ulnoiot.conf and run accesspoint and mqtt_broker. If you installed from the Raspberry Pi image, this should not be necessary.
• Copy the folder lib/system_templates to a project directory, you can rename system_templates to a project name (i.e. iot-test-project)
• Rename the included node_template to a name for the node you want to configure (i.e. onboard_blinker)
• Adapt and configure system.conf and node.conf. Especialy make sure to add the correct board in node.conf. If you use a Wemos D1 Mini (this is the default), no change is necessary here.
• Now change into your node directory, connect an esp8266 based microcontroller to your pc or raspberry/orange pi and type initialize. This flashes and pre-configures the device.
• Access the command prompt with console_serial (if only one esp is connected the serial port will be discovered automatically else supply it as usb1 or acm2 or an IP address and password as paramaters). If your wifi network is configured correctly, you can just type console. Its ip should now automatically be discovered, and you get a web-based terminal on it.

If something gets stuck, try to power cycle the esp8266.

initialize sets up your wifi based on the settings in system.conf and also encrypts the network connecting, but if you want to set it up manually, call wifi on the esp8266 node from the serial console.

Try typing help and check the small manual. You can setup the wifi with wifi( "network-name", "password" ). You can scan the existing wifi networks with wscan and when the wifi is configured, you can see the current ip with typing wip.

If you create an autostart.py file or modify the existing one in your nodes/files directory and then call deploy noupdate, you can add your own devices to this newly configured node. Don't forget to add run() add the end of your autostart file. However, try first to add some devices manually at the console command prompt, check and browse the help for available devices. Type run() to activate these devices and then use the mqtt_all and mqtt_send tools to watch and interact. Try also help("autostart.py") at the console prompt.

External Resources

This project would not have been possible without a thriving open source community around the Internet of Things. We make a lot of use of the following tools:

• The Tilde Texteditor
• create_ap forked for ulnoiot here.
• mosquitto.
• mpfshell forked for ulnoiot here.
• micropython
• node-red
• rpi-clone

As ulnoiot relies heavily on MQTT, it also integrates very easily with community home automation software like home-assistant and openhab.

Support

You can find the developers and people using ulnoiot on #ulnoiot:matrix.org or respectively riot in the group ulnoiot and might get answers there in real time. Feel also free to file and discuss issues, problems, and potential new features at http://github.com/ulno/ulnoiot. Please feel also free to contact ulno directly via http://contact.ulno.net, especially if you want to use ulnoiot in teaching yourself, or have somebody teach the use and opportunities of ulnoiot to you or your organization in person.

Further Documentation

• Some classes where ulnoiot is used
• micropython reference.
• For a very light introduction in general python, take a look at this.
• For any problems or just being social, visit us on matrix/riot: #ulnoiot:matreix.org