Home Automation Hangout 2021-07-04: The UT61E WiFi board is done!

place [Music] uh [Music] stuff it i can't be bothered waiting for the countdown [Laughter] okay two things are true i'm late for my own live stream and what's the second i'm totally disorganized that's it so in other words it's a normal sunday uh hang on i think the audio level might be a bit on the high side i'm going to crank it down a little bit hopefully that looks a little bit better oh ah so i acknowledge the traditional owners of this land i pay my respects to the elders past and present and to aboriginal elders and peoples from other communities who may be taking part in this live stream today so um peter says clearly i live close to a train station yes not well close enough that it doesn't take long to drive there and back far enough and over enough hills that walking is a little bit of a um a little bit of exercise and takes a while so yes that is why i um i had a last-minute request to please drive me to the train station all right now deep breaths gerald mike johnny peter michael chip i'm going back up the list lots of people here ceon's here yeah so a late start you're right sion aaron um ah okay uh aaron said check your discord direct messages i messaged you a couple of weeks ago related to this project not sure if my messages are getting through all right so i need to open discord for the first time in a while my notifications are going to be fun um ah doji says it's got coffee my wife is good enough to bring me a cup as i set up for the live stream normally when you see me on a sunday morning i've had one cup of coffee today i've had two it's i think it's been necessary morning gill all right uh still waiting for discord to start not that you care about that you don't need that i was hoping to have a lot more preparation done today i had an idea about something and i think we can still pull it off something that i did on my laptop and i don't have it here on my desktop which i'm currently using for streaming but my laptop is back there and i think we can probably um we can probably jerry rigg something get it working so what i was wanting to talk about today well what i wanted to show you ah all my live streaming setup it was a total mess that's the other thing this morning when i walked in because i've been experimenting with the item [Music] and i also when i do that impromptu live stream last week i did that from my linux machine so i installed obs on linux and i plugged the capture stuff into that which meant that all of my hdmi cables were plugged into the wrong place so it was a mess this morning and i don't actually have my scene changer so let's see if we go to overhead that one that is the one i want oh hang on where is yeah my obs setup is all stuffed so you can see the overhead camera and let me try this one how's that yes that's better so now we have the front camera and the overhead camera and here we have ut 61e wi-fi interfaces but there is a a little mess-up so this is something that i talked about oh sean says atem is unplugged that's not good i'm going to [Music] the short answer is it's going to be plugged back in again but i didn't have time to get it into a neat state before beginning the live stream this morning i need to do that another time that's not directly before a live stream so that i've got time to get everything sorted out this morning when i walked in it was a bit of a panic of what's the what's the most predictable thing i can do which is just plug everything back in the way i had it originally and not worry about it rather than experimenting with a new setup with different feeds into the you know using this as a capture device and everything so i did use this i had this when i did my the last live stream the impromptu one i did it using this but it was this capturing the cameras into the different inputs and then usb into obs on my ubuntu machine and that seemed to work pretty well so i'm going to get it set up just not yet now uh okay so as i explained on the other live stream there is a bit of a stuff up let's go to the microscope and i'll show you what i've had to do look at that there is a budge wire so the problem can we get better focus than that that looks okay so the problem is what we are doing is using usb through the serial connection to report back to the host computer but to acquire data from the multimeter we need to set up a software serial interface and for all of the for the original messing around when we were playing around with the stuff on the breadboard we had the lowland 32 light on there what i was doing was using one of the second hardware i was using the second hardware serial port on the esp32 because the sp32 has multiple uarts and so i was using gpio16 as the receive pin on esp32 and that was working fine so all of the stuff we've been doing previously with this multimeter hack project we've been acquiring data on gpio16 and i had a total brain fart moment and when i was laying out i'm just gonna launch eagle so we can have a look when i was laying out the pcb so laying out um [Music] this one this little pcb i for some reason it didn't even cross my mind that we were changing from an esp32 to an esp8266 because this is running a d1 mini on it and so i just left it on gpio16 thinking oh that'll be no problem i can just run software serial we only need what is it 19200 bits a second i think is the board rate for this interface and then after i assembled the boards and i started i just changed the software compiled it for the esp8266 i discovered that gpio16 is one pin in particular that you cannot use for software serial on the a266 there is a limitation on that particular pin and some other pins that prevent you from using it for that purpose so i ended up having to switch to a different pin and that is what this little bodge wire is for you can see that the track comes down here and originally well the original track comes across here and it joins onto this pin so that's gpio16 and what i've done is cut the track you can just barely see there's a cut just there and then use some wire wrap wire to extend the track bring it down and connect it to this one so the result is that instead of being on d where was it instead of being on d0 it's now on d5 so instead of gpio16 i can't even remember what the d1 mini pin translates to linuxes are mostly almost not quite clone of unix yeah well that depends on what your definition of unix is i know a lot of people that say linux is unix now so are we talking about sko unix and which release etc [Music] um oh yeah let's go you can die in a fire well i think they already have what ended up happening with that so there was the lawsuit with sco uh anyway let's not it's that particular rabbit i don't want to talk about 20-year-old legal arguments um or 15-year-old legal arguments and copyright lawsuits and things that's not so much fun yes ah yes sko is an evil twin it is oh michael says it's recently fired up again let's go is back do we need to smack it on the head again um all right it's happening already my brain is off chasing squirrels because of uh something that came up in the chat all right all right where are we now oh actually something i should something just this is this is definitely a squirrel it's not related to what is on the screen right now but it's worth bringing up and i've kind of mentioned this before the question of when i do these live streams so the uh i was actually quite shocked when i did the impromptu live stream and when was it i think it was thursday or was it friday night uh a week ago and i got on live stream what time was it it was in the evening it was like nine o'clock at night eight o'clock at night and within a few minutes there were 73 people on the livestream which is more than are on the live stream right now at the regular time when there are people have notifications of it and i usually tweet about it and put it on facebook and things like that and so what it gave me so what i thought was when i do that impromptu live stream i might get like three people turning up to it just because they got the notifications and wasn't it a friday night yeah i think it was a friday night but it was like late on a friday night and so my expectation was that i would just hit go live and i would just say that i couldn't do a live stream that week and about three people would would get the notifications and see and i had more people on that for that live stream with no warning then come along on a sunday uh on a sunday morning so johnny says yes this is in the middle of the night for us so anyway what i've been thinking about is maybe i should change the live stream time maybe i should be doing it sunday evening instead of sunday morning which might be better for other parts of the world and [Music] uh yeah it might be okay for people in australia too i don't know so i've been thinking about that maybe i should switch to a sunday evening live stream or maybe i should do a sunday evening live stream as well my life would become live streaming what what am i doing alright so hang on what happened to eagle i thought i was opening eagle where is it it has opened it just took a really long time all right so projects and uh let's switch to um let's switch to desktop view and where what am i looking for oh that's right ut 61e wi-fi hardware so what i've done is all right so to summarize my thinking about what to do with this project and the fact that the pin is now incorrect i had how many was it there's six some oh there's the packet here ah fell apart this is the packet i had 20 of the pcbs made for this just because they're small and i was piggybacking it onto another order so and this whole thing is kind of a it's just a messing around sort of project it's nothing serious so i don't expect that i'm ever going to make more than the 20 boards that i've had fabricated and so what i'm doing this is my plan basically so what you can see here is this design is version 1.1 of this pcb i've already revised it so what i've done is moved this data pin from d0 gpio16 and i've brought it down here to match the patch that is on on that particular module and it comes into d5 which is gpio14 and i have changed the firmware so the firmware that's on github now points to this i o pin and the design files now have the connection to that io pin now the reason for doing that and pushing it is that if someone else comes along and finds this repo i want them to see something that works not something that doesn't work and uh [Music] so even though i haven't produced these and i i may never produce the version 1.1 pcbs because all there might be three people that will be interested in getting this board so what i've done i'm locking stuff over so what i've done is assemble six plus one for myself this is it so this is the this is the roster of these little multimeter adapters and then i've got a few spare pcbs that haven't been assembled so my what my plan is and i've patched all of these so each one of these has the little bodge wire on it i've also ordered some clear heat shrink so that i can put heat shrink around it and there was an offer also please remind me was it james who offered to design a 3d printable case for this i have a feeling it was james but if it was please speak up please confirm so what i'm going to do is heat shrink these and clear heat shrink so that you can still see the led and see the squirrel because that's the most important feature of this thing and make these available in fact these are available right now oh also it's very good 261e wi-fi so the url this is kind of a miracle the url on the uh on the pcbs works it takes you to a real live web page which is very unexpected for something that i've done and so there is now a web page where you can go along i've put six in stock i just put twenty dollars on them as a price because i don't know why it just seemed not too unreasonable yes i know that this whole thing is two resistors a transistor capacitor and an led plus a connector and a pcb oh plus a d1 mini so the idea is that this is all-inclusive what you get for your 20 bucks is the entire thing fully assembled with the d1 mini on it and uh yeah ready for firmware in fact what i'm do what i've done is i've already loaded the firmware on all of these but you'll need to reload it in order to match your wi-fi credentials and and all that sort of thing i know sorry peter i have broken your expectations um yeah anyway so the whole pricing thing here uh this this little thing twenty dollars seems ridiculously overpriced to me because of what there is in it the actual bill of materials cost even including like including the d1 mini i think the bill of materials cost on this comes to like seven bucks eight bucks it's in that region anyway and twenty dollars seems like a um uh it seems like a lot for something that is so simple but it's kind of a specialist thing and i i sat here for a couple of hours and assembled a few of them so i got to take that into account and oh and also i'm going to supply a usb cable with these as well so they'll come in the usb cable prop in proper packaging and everything so anyway i'm being very apologetic about the price here that's just the way it is i never feel like i can price things properly i always feel like i'm over charging and yet it's still not even worth my time to be making them at that price so uh where are we oh okay links links design file so if you go to the link to github and i'm gonna yeah it's kind of circular so we've got the the github link here i'm gonna drop this into the chat uh yes kabletti it should be priced on value not just cost of goods sold you are absolutely right yeah anyway this is the repo and this one has the updated design files and i've made a note on here saying that the pin has been changed from gpio16 to gpio14 and photos of are of the v 1.0 pcb and in oh and there's a link there to the page where you can you can actually buy one if you want to now in firmware what we have here are three different chunks of firmware there is the serial reflector which is what we were using originally just to make a connection to the multimeter and a connection to the host and just bounce the data through it it doesn't do anything more than that and i think let's see what isn't it yeah it just opens a second serial port and it just reflects around so whatever comes in from the multimeter goes out to the host i left that in there just because it's useful to to do some testing to see if you've got a valid connection to your multimeter this only works on the lowland on the esp32 though it doesn't work on these little boards so then there are two different versions there is the d1 mini version of the firmware and the lowland 32 version so the lowland 32 version is what you would use if you're breadboarding it using alolan light or you know whatever you want to use and it's got a config example uh did i reveal anything bad in here no i didn't okay so it's got a config.h dash example so what you need to do is take that and rename it to just config.h put in your wifi details put in your mqtt details username and password if you have it and then you can compile it for the lowland 32 and then there is the d1 mini version so this is the version that is optimized optimized wrong word it's basically this is the version that runs on these little devices and [Music] it had oh it still says esp32 version i've got to fix that [Music] so it um it uses the ws2812 it's very hard for you to read isn't it i should zoom this way in so it uses the ws2812 to display status and what it does now is as it's booting up it goes through different colors on the led to show you its progress of connecting to wi-fi connecting to mqtt and ready to go and then once it's receiving data from the multimeter the led flickers green each time it gets a packet of data so twice a second you get a green flash and then you know that you are getting data from your multimeter anyway i think we'll connect this up in a minute and see what it does maybe hook a signal generator up to the multimeter input so we're getting some data and see what comes back include wi-fi yeah there's still some stuff here that needs cleaning up because this is what i did was took the lowland 32 version and duplicated it and then um i just yeah modified it to make it work on the esp8266 i'm going to go through all this code now you can see the stuff here where it's setting the um the colors on the led as it starts up and it doesn't do any decoding so there's there's lots of work to do from the software side and maybe we'll have a look at that today that's something that i was going to show you on the that's what i was referring to earlier about the thing on the laptop i've got stuff on the laptop that does packet decoding for the data from this it's not my work it's someone else's work but it it works which is cool so now we have a page where if you really really wanted to you could go and buy one of these things for the few people that have a ut61e multimeter and then you can grab the example code and load it up now i'm going to switch away what i'm going to do uh green flash did someone say triethyl aluminium or if you're american should it be triethyl aluminum i don't know ah um [Music] what was i gonna do that's right i'm going to do i need to open the ide i don't think i do all right let's let's get a connection onto this and [Music] overhead that all right let's get one of these hooked up and get some data and see what we can do with it doesn't matter which one they should at the moment these are all loaded with firmware that links to my wifi and my mqtt broker in fact i think i'm going to change some settings and maybe reflash it so now that you can't see my screen i'm going to edit the config file of the photo the wi-fi and the broker etc now what can we do i need the signal generator okay i'm going to it's normally mounted up above the bench i'm going to pull it out so that we can get it in place that it can be seen i think we're going to need a little bit more field of view up here so let's zoom zoom out and then what else do i need ideally another multimeter because i want to be able to see what's on the screen where is my i've got another ut61a over here i think the one that normally lives yes the one that normally lives in my backpack and goes everywhere with me uh hmm it's still got the wires hanging out of it from from the early experiments that we were doing all right i think this still works like it slides over the top of those wires is it going to fit all right so this is the optical interface that pulls the data out of the back of the multimeter and that is going to be floating around in the air coming off the end of that blue wire it's a blue no i think the blue wire is the ground connection the yellow wire there will be data trying to escape from that pin and then it's available on here and then if we plug that in there i'll turn it over this way it's kind of a weird thing because normally you would look at it like this and have the d1 mini on top but the way i designed it it's kind of meant to be like this so it sits upside down you can see the squirrel and stuff on there that's where the led is exposed now i need what else do i need i'm going to need power for the signal gen because i've pulled it off the bench i'm going to need to plug it into what will i plug it into plug it into a lab supply because it needs five volts at a surprisingly large number of amps and plug that in there what do i want five volts two amps on and go yes now uh channel one need some signal aha somebody set up us the bomb we have signal so we should have i don't even what is this set to a very high frequency well not very high it's set to no it's not very high at all this is set to what we were doing when we were experimenting a little while ago with the um with cleaning up the signal so yeah let's set to 100 hertz we're only going to get two samples a second coming off the multimeter and we also need usb usb i've got a heap of usb cables hanging here but i need one what about this one yes this one will do nicely so if i plug usb in here now we get the led coming on as it starts to boot and uh oh you can you can just see it i think on the camera if i cover it you see the green flash if i get the angle right there you're only seeing it intermittently which is weird and i think that's just because of the um the frame rate of the camera it's when the frame rate of the camera happens to coincide with the timing of the led flashing but that led is flashing green which shows that it's getting data from the multimeter we're in voltage mode turn on the output and we now have the multimeter oh it's averaging because the multimeter sample rate is very low i wonder how low we can go with this um let's see uh what can we do start frequency stop frequency hmm anyway let's look at that in a moment wave wave let's try [Music] sorry i'm thinking about firmware while doing this so my brain is in multiple places let's see oh that's the arduino ide opened with a client project so it's a good thing that i i did not have the desktop visible all right i'm going to change the i have a couple of mqtt brokers on my network there is the one that i actually care about which in my home automation system runs on and it uses encryption and all the good stuff and authentication and there is the other one that is just like a a general purpose broker that's got no authentication and i just throw any random thing at it sorry i'm having a look through this while i uh i'm going to upload new firmware onto that in just a moment let's see dev module i want esp8266 lol132 and i'm not showing you this because at the moment on my screen i've got all my wi-fi details so switching to d1 mini profile uh come on all right oh yeah peter said it wasn't the reason this was designed so you put the display on the live feed how you going to do that that is a very good question and that relates to the stuff that i've got on my laptop that i will hopefully get to in just a little tickety minute uh what have i got yeah sorry i'm also making changes to the thing to upload it which port it's a usb port 240 and upload all right compiling uh scott says you need a lab ap for testing in live streams yes i do i'm like yes all the credentials all we see is star star star um yeah i have um i have uh unify access points which support up to four you can run four different ssids on them and at the moment all four are in use because i have my i have a normal wi-fi network i have a guest wifi network i have an not network and an iot network so i can't add a fifth one which is just for testing but of course i can just run my own access points i've got other access points in fact the one here oh let's not go down that you can tell that my brain is not on the job today still compiling come on you can compile [Music] johnny says there are javascript libraries so you can subscribe to mqtt in the browser yes nice now let's see what we can do here i'm gonna go i wonder how can i do one hertz yes i can so now we'll get some more variation you can see the display is jumping around i've got an offset on here as well so let's change the offset to zero oh that was weird all right zero offset so we'll go between zero volts and five volts it's currently running at one hertz i wonder if i can make it lower i've got no idea what the minimum frequency is on this let's try going down to [Music] yeah let's do this we'll make it point one of a hertz oh it just went to 100 megahertz okay it looks like it can't go below oh hang on no i think you 0.1 yeah so .001 megahertz one micro hertz okay let's just try i'll make it one [Music] uh micro hertz okay i didn't know it had oh that's millihertz okay no i thought it was going to megahertz but it was going to millihertz that that's cool all right let's make it one millihertz now now let's um take it up a little bit i'll make it i get 10 millihertz so [Music] no not high enough to see much variation in the output 10 let's go to 100 millihertz what i should do is stop and think about the about what this actually means so a millihertz yes 0.1 over hertz 100 millihertz is 0.1 of hertz so it should be varying what i'm expecting to see is more variation here see this is sitting right around two and a half volts minus two and a half that multimeter is getting confused so what we should be seeing is a sweep pattern that goes um let's just change it to um [Music] let's make it a sine wave as well rather than a square wave maybe we'll get some more interesting numbers coming out yeah that apart from those negative numbers which is just weird that is more like the sort of semi-randomness that i was expecting to see with a 100 millihertz sine wave from 0 to 5 volts [Music] not that it matters the point is that we're getting numbers coming up on the multimeter and that was what i cared about oh this thing's finished compiling and uploading let's see what is happening on the serial monitor and i'll switch you back to this other view in a moment and where are we desktop desktop there we go okay so this is the serial monitor now coming off it and you can see that we're getting actual numbers here so we're getting data coming from the multimeter and this four that you see appearing here i have a feeling is that when it goes negative oh i know why it's going negative and i bet i bet you are all telling me this it's because i set the offset to zero yeah it'll be sweeping between negative and positive but why it just i just saw a negative 20 on there that doesn't make any sense and 20. the um unless it's the scale is going strange it might be like 20 millivolts i think the auto ranging on the multimeter is maybe having a bit of a freak out plot twist he's killed the meter maybe g'day mako yeah so where to from here we have data coming from the multimeter we are reporting it to the serial port now let's i'm just going to switch this again this view again while i do something else on my computer what i need is a computer set up just for live streaming that doesn't have any confidential stuff on it okay so back to back to desktop okay so we have a um [Music] let's zoom this in to make it easier to read bring it down here and what do we need to subscribe to i'm just going to hit reset on the on here so that we get it startup messages and turn off auto scroll so this is the topic that we want so what do i do mosquito sub let's be my siege that's the um the general purpose miscellaneous broker and then i want that oops that is the topic and do we get anything yes so we are getting the same data pushed to the mqtt broker now this is where we can start doing some decoding back to here and it was actually a few weeks ago that i was looking at this so i'm not sure what state it is in [Music] not feeling up to watching streams yeah right now i'm not feeling up to doing streams [Music] come on wake up my either my laptop is frozen i know it was just taking a really long time to come out of sleep so this is going to be super uninteresting for just a moment but i'm going to just see if i can find the um the packet decoder that i had on my laptop uh it was where i don't even know where i had it where did i put it maybe i have a feeling that it was a module that i like a python module that i installed anyway if this takes me more than a moment to find i'm not going to screw around with it on live stream while you're all sitting there or i should say go and talk among yourselves grab a cup of coffee or something is it in the readme oh no maybe it's in resources yes this is absolutely riveting isn't it no i don't know where it is ut no anyway uh i will find it and uh okay ah scott i need to fix so i've got local dns [Music] i don't know it's never really bothered me like for some reason i prefer using ips rather than host names because whenever there is a problem with the network it's always dns ah so if you eliminate dns you eliminate a whole lot of problems i just like the certainty of uh of of talking directly to an rp address so um aaron sir ask the very good question which is is your plan to pass on the esp and send by mqtt or pass raw over mqtt and pass on your pc and the answer is both what i'm intending to do so step one is what we've got right here if we come into here we've got um in somewhere [Music] i'm resisting the urge to click on the config tab because that will reveal everything but down here okay so what we've got is there are two topics that are defined there is the raw topic and the json topic and at the moment what's happening is that we are taking the data and where is it we're just reading the raw data building it up in this buffer so we've got the gmqtt message buffer and as the characters come in from the multimeter we're just building it up and then reporting it to mqtt so we're not doing any parsing at all on the d1 mini right now we are taking the raw information and passing it on so what you are seeing in the serial console and um aaron i'm pretty sure you already know this i'm just kind of summarizing it for people that have joined more recently so at the moment what you're seeing in the serial console over here and reported to mqtt over here is the raw packet so that these characters are exactly what is coming back from the multimeter encoded in that is the value that the multimeter is reading and other information like what mode it's in whether it's in volt mode and one of the digits is the the decimal point offset so for example you can say that you're in volt mode and then you can use the offset to figure out whether what you're looking at is volts or millivolts or whatever so uh contained in these characters is all the information that you need to extract the information about what mode the multimeter is in and what the current value is that it's reading so there are a couple of things you can do and as aaron very astutely questioned we can either simply pump these raw values so these raw packets off to mqtt and then from the point of view of the interface like this little device that we've built be done with it you don't care about it anymore you're just acting as a gateway and then that has to be processed by some script elsewhere something that is subscribed to mqtt or that is reading the data off the serial port but alternatively what we can do is add a packet decoder in here so what we do is we build up the data by reading um by reading the characters coming from the multimeter until we've got a packet and then so here we've got the uh no that's not even being used right now everything in report to mqtt is currently being is commented out this is leftover stuff from when this firmware was originally done on the air quality sensor and you can see here it's got the section where it is printing the buffer so this is an example of forming some json to insert values anyway my plan is to get back to using this to add a decoder in here and what the decoder will do is look at the characters in the packet figure out what mode the multimeter is in extract the value that is being read and including the position value for the decimal point and then depending on what is being read it will form up some i think probably just jason is the easiest it'll form up some json and report it so what we will get back is two sets of data and of course if anybody else wants to hack around on this firmware go for it these are not the only ways that this can be done so what we'll get back is the raw data which is exactly the packet as it is and then also get back a json message which can include the decoded version so if you just wanted to watch the feed you would see oh we're in volts range and this is the value or we're in current range and this is the value and i still don't really know how that json should be structured i think my first impression is that there would probably be an attribute for the range and an attribute for the value and those are really just like it sounds very simple there may be some complications to it but i think that's probably all we need so down here where we are reporting it it uh what have we got pm i mean this is obviously for the air quality sensor it's got particular matter values and things but what we would do is um it would be like ut 61e and then we would have range and then we would have value and you know get rid of that and uh this would be g ut i mean these i'm just making these variables up right now they probably they don't exist uc61e range and 61e value get rid of that and that basically so this is what it would we'd be a buffer with the range and the value in it and report it as an mqtt as a json message just gonna hit save on that um so in the short term though the thing is that decoding the packet is kind of annoying and it's already been done by other people not in a not in like a an arduino or an esp8266 type environment as far as i can see let's see python ut61e packet decoder using the power of google uh somewhere i've oh here we go it's in my history so this thing uh reads let's see all right maybe we can do something with this so what i did with this previously um where are we pip install ut 61 e let's see if this works i've just opened it in another console so what all right so backing up what i found i'm going to while this other thing is running i'm going to explain what this does based on my very dodgy memory from several weeks ago and you all know that my memory is bad so i'm probably going to be telling you totally the wrong thing so oh i think it's installed uh pip list ut 61e i may even just be able to demonstrate it rather than trying to explain it to you yeah okay sorry i'm doing some off-screen typing for a moment while i just check what happened with this installation ut 61e uh pi usb i have a feeling pi hit api i can't remember which one of these pi usb no hit api that's my memory is coming back to me now okay so i'm going to switch this over this could all end up being a total major fail so what we've got is what i've just done was a pip installed ut61e and it what it's done is installed this package and it includes a couple of python scripts so there is the hit api script and the pi usb script now what i discovered let's see if i can python three i'm trying to remember how i did this i think what i did was subscribe to [Music] let's try this i'm just going to do that and then pipe that to that uh will this work i don't know the thing is that my python installation on here is really screwed up permission denied okay so is that going to do anything ah siphon hid api yeah there was some thing i did to get this all working um [Music] let's just have a look at this i have a feeling that what i did originally was i changed this to explicitly be all the python people are going to be shouting at me so use it in python 3 i think which python three use a local bin python three is there a user bin python3 come on autocomplete i don't know which one python yes there is okay let's just try this so we've got that permission denied let's just use the big hammer and see what happens okay well you can see with dot dot dot all right come on not found ut61c i don't know unexpected maker shouting at you okay yes i know all of the um all of the python people are shouting at me so where is xeons i'm looking back at uh all right so kabliti said so i was wondering for this ud61a readout tool that may be generating a direct video stream with the readout in it that could be used as feed into obs or something is that too hard yeah so having basically treating it like it's a webcam sort of thing i don't think that's necessary because what we can do is make a little interface it could be even a web page and just have a very small web browser window and then just capture that window into obs so i think we can do it in a simpler way than doing than generating hdmi and then capturing the hdmi uh yeah all right now um look at aaron's notes his suggestion and cody is a much better solution okay cool um i guess that is in the discord all right so i should go i um and have a look in discord and be totally freaked out by user google being and be totally freaked out by oh this may even be python 2 maybe that's what's going on here yeah maybe no yeah there was a um what am i looking at okay so i will go and have a look at discord in just a moment but first while i'm trying to figure this out using hit api using hit api provided by the operating system [Music] or except it allows to read from usb hit adapter cable yeah when i did this a few weeks ago what i found the very brief summary is that oh that's what i want yes i've been trying to run the wrong thing it's the um i want the es51922 script which is um yeah there it is sorry yes i knew that there was some little trick here that i discovered a few weeks ago ut61a and i will get to aaron's thing in just a moment all right we are actually getting somewhere here i think permission denied not found okay i've gone silent while i'm frantically typing off screen i think is it python 3 or is it python [Music] python 2.7 python drives me nuts such a mess of versions and working spaces and okay python 2.7 i think yes yes yes okay i've had some success uh sorry i've been doing doing something off screen here user bin python yeah this module still requires python 2.7 so um 2.7 okay let's try yes this is not my happy place let's try that yes okay we are making progress here again all right where am i back in this console all right so what i want is not that i want that and i think because my permissions are screwed up i need that let's see if this all explodes come on not found so if i do that it's going to say permission denied all right but the setup on my laptop was different now anyway a whole lot of messing around let's have a look at what aaron is suggesting because i'm sure aaron is much smarter than me and has a much needed way of doing it all right going back aaron aaron aaron okay having a look in dm oh wow uh i don't think i can drag i'm not gonna pull no actually i'm definitely not gonna pull this onto the screen where you can see it because aaron has got some personally identifiable information in the private chat but this looks amazing so what aaron sent me is a message saying uh that he started on a desktop app for the ut61e wi-fi to mqtt board and i'm gonna let's see i'm gonna get this out i want to show you this screenshot because this looks fantastic see if i can get this screenshot out somewhere that i can show it to you without revealing all of the private chat that aaron has sent me look at this so cool it's got the unity logo in it looks great so aaron uh i'm impressed what was this done in yeah okay aaron oh i will send you one of these do you have a multimeter do you have the ut61e multimeter i can't remember let's i think you might have mentioned at some point uh yeah i'm scrolling back through the private chat i can't see it all right back into the live stream chat um oh aaron sent me also a dropbox link if i click that i'm just wondering if it's going to open somewhere no it opens off screen which means i get to see it before yeah it's the same screenshot as i've just grabbed out of the private chat that looks so cool aaron ah all right now aaron says no but i'm willing to buy one um you'd buy a multimeter just for this project now i do actually like the ut61e multimeters they they are um they're still after all these years i think pretty much in the sweet spot of being a decent multimeter at a reasonable price in fact um i bought one for chris for his birthday only a couple of months ago so i still think they're they're good value so aaron if you were going to buy a multimeter anyway then go for it if your t61e is a good one to buy if you but i don't like the idea of you going out and spending money and buying a multimeter just so that you can work on this project that's um it seems like it's an unnecessary expense so [Music] if maybe we can work out some way that i can do the testing for you or whatever but in any case i am very happy to send you one of these one of these i can i've already got your postal address so i can send one to you and then we can have this awesome looking multimeter interface aaron says it will render real-time qtt messages to a given topic just wanting to learn approach to see if i need to work on parsing application side or if the device will pause it okay now the i want this to be able to report pre-decoded messages so [Music] right now yes you would have to do the decoding but the decoding i don't want you to have to worry about that because what i really want is for this to be able to push the data to a broker and then have have different uis you might have for example you might want to pull the data into a database like a time series database and log it over time and that way what you could do is use a multimeter for things like long term testing or for reading i don't know reading voltages off batteries over time or something anyway there are all sorts of situations where you might want to use an interface like this to read data and store it or display it in different ways you might want to stick it into a text file and store it like as a log file with timestamps all sorts of things you might want to do so i don't want to put the burden of decoding the packets onto the onto whatever is going to be using the data that seems like taking a problem that should be solved in one place and making it be solved in many places so yeah you could display it in home assistant yeah otherwise we're going to end up with duplication like you'll end up with a a packet decoding routine written in python and someone else will do one in c and then you know there'll be a version in pretty much everything and i would like to have it just output the data already passed now what i was working on showing you and because of my messed up python setup on my computer all right so where i was going with all of this let's try where do i have it now on my laptop this works just get it so that it's not wrapped so what happens is i've got some permissions thing i don't think i'm going to dig into this right now so on the laptop if i do um which one is it i think it was with python basically that in fact let's just see if i can get this going on the laptop scooter no maybe not hmm why what is going on with my laptop mosquito is not which mosquito sub all right my whole computing environment is a total shambles right now anyway what what this does this utility the es51922.pi and what it does is act as a decoder okay let's have a look at that and you can feed it the aurora packet from a ut61 multimeter and it tells you all sorts of useful things um it's probably not a whole lot of point reading through all of this but yeah so range voltage it's reading the um it sets the different ranges based on decimal point position all of that sort of thing so it's using these bit masks to to set the range so it's got all those definitions at the front capacitance etc continuity discovers all of those things and different functions to deal with the different modes lots of definitions so all of this stuff is being done in and it goes on and on and on here we go so there it displays some results and down here is where it does the actual parsing i think parser add argument blah blah blah and it outputs values to a csv file oh you can and you can also have no file by default what it does is write the outputs to a csv file and it displays the values in a human readable format as well so uh where are we help output file verbose m mode csv or readable um apple mode default is csv yeah anyway if my computer wasn't a mess this would work and so what it does is it just accepts the packet on standard in so by taking the output from the subscription and then just sending it to this library if that if the permissions on that were working okay hang on i know this is going to be super ugly i hate to do this let's just see if this makes any difference permission denied no there's something else going on no i'm not going to do any more live debugging it's kind of annoying [Music] yeah yeah scott says i'm looking at amazon listing just under 100 um i can't remember how much i paid i think if you amazon would be probably more convenient for you because i think it ships quickly if you're not in a huge hurry you can order it from the uni trends official store and for anybody who is wanting to have a look at this to mess around with this themselves and is actually wanting to buy a multimeter where is it so on the gear page i've got links to this do i have a link to the multimeter multimeter this one okay is it a link yeah so this is full disclosure this is an affiliate link so if you come along to super house dot tv slash gear and then come down to multimeter and click on unity ut61e that's an affiliate link that will take you to aliexpress and it's the unity official store so this is where um this is actually the manufacturer of the multimeter selling them on aliexpress 59.60 what's the shipping is there shipping it's free shipping okay so 60 bucks each u.s with free shipping to australia it'll take a little bit longer than if you buy it through amazon because i think the amazon seller will probably have local or semi-local stock uh yeah so as aaron says if it outputs in the feed we can visualize nothing the desktop app could potentially do hold graphing storing etc yeah that's really cool i like that aaron i'm really impressed with the uh with how you've done that scott miller 75 85 canadians ah so aaron your last express took 16 weeks to arrive um that's not good i wonder if that also see on asked if i could post this link all right this is the gear page i found that aliexpress recently has been really quick again we had that really bad period where the world's logistics infrastructure seemed to totally just fall over and become useless for a year probably nearly a year but it seems to be back and mostly working i've been on i'm going to drag this off screen again just while i open my google docs folder and i'm going to check all right i'm gonna reveal some of my aliexpress purchase history because i i track everything that i order when i ordered it when it arrived and calculate shipping times and all that sort of thing but i just want to open this off screen before i potentially reveal things and i shouldn't now okay are there any things here that i have received [Music] sorry still loading the google doc loading loading all right i think it's okay for me to show you this i hope i'm not going to reveal anything that i shouldn't um one thing i don't know is whether the url for the spreadsheet in itself is confidential i don't know i think this is i don't think you can access it even if you see the url for this you won't be able to do anything much so this is my spreadsheet of super house parts orders so what i've got is what i ordered how many the price which is mostly in us dollars what the total was for that particular order how much tax was included the date it was ordered the date it arrived and then a calculation column for how many days it took to arrive and just a thing of whether it has arrived and notes and the url so that if i want to i can just reorder so i can look back at what i've ordered in the past and then click on the link and go back to the original seller so you can see there are and this is just the freetronix one i've also got another spreadsheet for oh sorry this is just a super house one i got another spreadsheet the same for free tronics purchases but that is considerably longer it's many hundreds of rows so if we look back at some recent purchases and this is aliexpress screw terminals 100 pack of screw terminals took 14 days um these were really impressively fast i ordered a a 10 pack of xiaomi zigbee environmental sensors and a four pack of door sensors and they arrived in seven days and this was ordering off aliexpress so and i don't think i didn't pay for a dhl or anything that was just like epacket shipping now that to get something in on a packet from china to australia in seven days from the time that it was ordered that is pretty damn fast and likewise here so this was also aliexpress and i'm pretty sure this was not local stock i got 50 db37 pcb mount connectors 50 plugs 50 sockets and they arrived in nine days you can so you can look back through my recent history here there is nothing here which is really shockingly long these arrived in 15 days nine days oh this was um transceiver modules so i got 20 modules 433 megahertz transceiver modules shipped from china as far as i know just on a packet nine days to arrive so scrolling back through my history here it's typically two weeks and there are some outliers look at this this one this was a feral crimping tool set that took 34 days i ordered 50 of room 32 modules that took 31 days but most of these in recent times so this is through april may june and then into the start of july and you can see the most recent ones haven't actually arrived yet oh these ones are taking a while i ordered 150 rj45 sockets the four-way sockets and that was two weeks ago so that's no that's not taking a long time that's still only 14 days ago no 17 18 days ago but still that's quite reasonable if they arrive this week that's a pretty respectable time uh yeah so at least to australia ordering stuff from aliexpress is not being ridiculously slow so if we go back a little bit you can see some stuff just never arrived uh yeah even back here when was this june 2019 so the period when things were really bad was through uh through 2020 basically let's see july 2020 this took oh these were lcd so i ordered a couple of lcds and they took 42 days to arrive rj45 ethernet extensions took 23 days even that's not horrible what have we got usbc cables anti-static bags these took a month and a half ooh look at this ziploc bags took nearly two months to arrive when was that january 2021 yeah but the most recent stuff if you ignore the stuff that hasn't arrived yet yeah this one's getting a little bit long that's going to be a long delivery time but if you look down here most of that is pretty respectable transit times hmm yes [Music] where am i what am i i'm just someone trying to get by in the world now where'd you go with this oh yeah so um yeah 56 days on those ziplock bags yes um what are we doing i don't know the um the signal generator seems to have gone to sleep at least its screen is gone to sleep but it's still outputting stuff [Applause] [Music] all right i need to write a little to-do list for myself uh and no nobody suggest a trello board please trello breaks my brain i've multiple times i've had people that i've been working on working with on projects set up trello boards and things like kanban is okay but for some reason i don't know why i think it's the trello software itself the way the interface works i just can't it's like i have a selective blindness for it or something and yes i know it's just like post-it notes and moving along between columns and things but it's still for some reason trello just really annoys me okay so what i need to do my to-do list i'm i'm ending i'm going to end a live stream with some homework to do so post aaron the ut61e board that is item number one on my to-do list item number two is get um decoder library working okay so that what i'm going to do is mess around with the environment on my computer and make wherever it is my terminal's gone now where's the terminal and make this work because at the very least what this allows is to push the raw data to mqtt and then we can decode the packets and we can see what state it's in and that can be very useful as a way of then validating whatever other implementation that is done so where i want to go with this is i want to have two mqtt subscriptions running side by side and one of them is going to be to the raw data and then displaying the decoded version and then using this to decode it and the other one is going to be to the json topic which will be the data that is decoded on the d1 mini and in theory those two things should give the same values so what we should see is a series of um of bits of in of readings coming out of the multimeter from those two different sources one via this python library the other one being decoded on the multimeter and the values should match and that's and then switching between different ranges and things they should also they should both show the same thing so that's how i'm planning to validate the this is assuming that the python library is working properly but this is how i'm planning to validate that the thing is working uh what was the what was the four-channel scope on the planet okay um sion has my phone number is my phone on silent i don't even know where my phone is right now where i put it down somewhere so mako says ceo needs my phone number to get my attention all right uh where i'm okay i'm gonna go digging back through what has seon been shouting at the computer and trying to tell me oh seon you just ordered one of those multimeters cool uh all right see on yeah oh so ceon says you've been getting stuff much faster as well um so aaron said do i have a reference or docs on how to decode all the data what is the extent of what's outputted are you wanting to digitally replicate the ut61e visible screen data via mqtt short answer on those is yes yes and yes there is a reference there is a doc um [Music] from peter lola is using alternative channels to ping me okay uh let's um let's see what peter is pinging me with via back channels [Music] yeah all right oh okay um just like to post a link to the super house product page for the wi-fi adapter all right let's um [Music] let's find that too many things open i think this will be it super house dot tv ut 61e wi-fi just before i hit enter i'm going to test whether that works it's a um this is the shortened version of the link which then redirects to the actual thing is it does it work yes it does there you go oh wow hang on it says five in stock someone's just ordered one ah okay now what [Music] [Laughter] a very funny animated gif of a squirrel yes all right so aaron i will post you one of those modules oh yeah that'll delay this side of the project 15th of august that is a long time i wonder if they are being super pessimistic about their um their shipping estimates and it'll actually get there faster hmm don't know oh there it says five in stock there it says six in stock all right let's get out of that i don't know what i'm doing i need more caffeine i definitely need more caffeine what i need to do is uh is do seon's thing of bringing the coffee onto the live stream with me four left ooh maybe i'd better start ordering [Music] uh ordering more pcbs with the version 1.1 ah it'll be fine all right so for the people that have ordered it i assume that the two people that have ordered this are in the chat right now and uh do you want me to just ship it to you as is or do you want to wait a little bit and get the clear heat shrink around it because they're um even though i've made them available on the online store uh yes they still need the heat shrink oh looking for the members discount code oh good point cable tie cabletti discount code i was going to mention this so it is now the 4th of july here in australia which means that we are now into the next quarter which means there is a new discount code and i've only been four days late so if you are a patreon supporter or a github sponsor right just a little bit before the live stream i send out an update with the new discount code in it and you'll also say check your email for that and that same discount code will get you access to the latest post on the super house site which is the still work in progress draft of the two-year conversion video part three and so at the moment it's listed as a let's go there you all and then everybody else can kind of see this as well the latest post on the super house site is this one tasmania conversion with a direct serial connection just going to move this off the screen and put in a password this i'm just putting in the the current supporter discount code which also works to get access to this post which is not finished yet and it's got this part in it insert video here so this is where the video is going to end up going in and i'm still writing this page but it's um it's getting there so i've got an explanation of bootloader mode what you need to control what connections you need to make and different to your modules and i've got the three most common two-year modes mode sorry the three most common two-year modules with expressive chips on them are all laid out here with the pin outs and what you need to do to do serial reflashing anyway that's a work in progress and i was hoping to have that little video up actually a little while ago but the last few weeks things have been going on so i haven't yet it will be soon all right yeah seon says your thanks for your auto email went right into my spam folder um yeah my i have a very poor delivery rate for the automatic notifications that come off both the freetronix and the super house sites i think what i need to do is switch to using a different delivery method i had i was running an smtp server directly previously and then on one of them i switched over to using gmail's outgoing mail servers so it authenticates against gmail and then sends them and that seems to get better delivery but i um i very frequently get emails from from customers saying i ordered this a week ago and it what's going on why haven't you shipped it yet and in fact they were sent a um an email when it was packed and then another email when it was shipped and both of the emails ended up in their spam folder so they they think i've been ignoring them and their order has been shipped they just didn't see all the notifications all right so aaron says happy as it comes now who was it i have a feeling that it was james who had offered to design a 3d printed enclosure for this and uh whoever it is if whoever it is speaks up i will um i will post it or maybe it was ben i can't remember um yeah i know you need spf records set up yeah i've done spf so spf is in the protection framework yes i've done all of that i spent many many years running many many servers and i i don't want to deal with that stuff again that's why i don't want to deal with dns again oh interesting so christopher mcinvaney said in that blog post are you covering the power requirements for flashing via serial i hit lots of issues with flashing until i use a dedicated power supply independent from the usb to serial converter uh that's that's a really good point to raise i have not had that issue because the um the two devices that i use for flashing both have onboard voltage regulators that'll deliver up to 600 milliamps so i use the ap what is it the apk2112 i think i can't remember anyway whatever the it's the tiny little 23 style voltage regulator the very common one that many people use these days and so things like the um the esp flasher this thing can deliver 600 milliamps which is plenty basically so it's got the voltage regulator on there and the other device i use typically is this one so this is the usb to serial converter it's got a different voltage regulator on it but it's still rated for um for plenty of milliamps in fact that's the voltage regulator there so this one runs in 3.3 volt mode it does the i o at 3.3 volts and it supplies 3.3 volts but a lot of the really cheap usb to serial converters have well most of them are only 5 volts and in fact one of the issues is that a lot of usb to serial converters that say they are 3 volts or 3.3 volts actually supply 5 volts on the power rail and their data lines run at 3.3 volts so which is not much good when you're trying to power a target device which is meant to run at 3.3 volts so um [Music] you've raised a very good point yeah i should probably mention i'm going to stick that on my to-do list i am going to add an to-do item which is talk about power requirements for flashing i'm going to add that into part three and we can call it the um the christopher mcaveeney section of the video uh yeah that's one that's a particular problem i know of the problem but uh yeah i don't normally think about it because the particular devices that i use can supply enough current so yeah i will i will mention that i'll talk about that because that's something that can really trip people up if you get a usb to serial converter you connect it to your target device you try to communicate with it and you and it's not working and you don't know why that can be really really frustrating so yeah cool good point christopher thank you um ah scott says i recently added a switch to my standard programmer to let it flash devices with their own power supply yes so uh that is also a good solution i didn't make it switchable on this but you could hmm that yeah on the this is actually hacked together for that very reason so this usb to serial converter which you can't see very well because it's very small and we zoomed out it's got a little switch here to switch between 3.3 volt and 5 volt mode it's got the ftdi type header on here and it supplies power out wherever it is one of those pins but it always supplies power you can switch the voltage but you can't turn it on and off which means you can't isolate it and let the device run off its own power supply so this specific one that i've got here has been hacked what i did was cut the connector put a little two pin header on there and then i've got a jumper so if i pull that jumper off it isolates power on the ftdi header so that i can have the target device run off its own power and but it's not a feature of the board itself so having a switch on it to um to just make it easily selectable that's a cool idea scott i like that it's on the on this board it's got a jumper so this is slightly different but this is the this is the usb asp icsp programmer for avr boards and this has two jumpers on it one is for the slow clock mode and the other is for power so with this with icsp programmers you often have a target board that is already being powered some other way and you just want to talk to it via icsp header so with this it's got a jumper on it it's actually designed into the product you just pull that off and it isolates power it you have a common ground but you're no longer supplying power to the target anyway squirrel chasing peter you ordered 1500 worth of stuff where is it uh ap2112k thank you graham for the part number that's the voltage regulator uh yes it's in the mail peter it'll be there shortly just keep waiting keep waiting it'll get there but first you need to send me fifteen hundred dollars um uh christopher said are those esp flashy devices available on the freetronix website uh not on the freetronix it's um on the super house site and super house dot tv esp flasher i think that's the url i've just dropped it in here completely says only three ut 61e multimeter wi-fi interfaces left in stock oh i'd better fire up the uh the sweatshop and uh assemble some more 50 of stock sold in the first hour and a half all right uh any progress on the lse that is you know how warped my sense of time is i actually thought that i would talk about the multimeter interface for like the first 20 minutes of this live stream and then i'd be talking about the lsc so let's bail on little squirrel oh you can't even see it uh where are we desktop there let's bail on our little squirrel buddy and talk about the light switch controller just for a moment in what time we have left together i've got to clear some space what do i want that i'll turn that off get this out of the way i need to make myself some room here that that hopefully not cause any short circuits while i'm randomly moving stuff around oh and this this lead fell out and just reminded me on my most recent lcsc order i included some some sockets for making a multimeter i really really do not want to chase that squirrel right now but since people have been talking about it i have been super tempted to design a multimeter and put an esp32 in it so using the sp 32 as the main board put a big um put a big touch screen on it like a you know in somewhere in the three inch region touch screen and then we could have our own smart multimeter which could do data logging and it could read it could sample faster than the um uh sample faster than the ut61e all right making some space and i've got to grab just sliding out of your field of view here over to grab the light switch controller boards and overhead overhead there now so that's my you've seen this many times that the prototype still hanging around the um the test switch that i use just for checking things are working i've got the eight port version and the 16 port version they're assembled shove that over there i'm going to grab that again in a moment because i'm going to talk about restructuring the layout of all of this and the um the universal rack controller project all right now all right these work that's it on to the next thing next subject no no not really okay let's look at these in a little bit more detail so these are the um the interface boards that the light switches plug into and the idea is you can use these to build your own light switch controllers this is the super brief summary people that have come late to the party we've got an eight port version a 16 port version and i have not assembled one but we also have a 24 port version and because as we've seen in previous live streams the design for all of these came from the same thing so this was designed first and then all i did was take a hacksaw to the design and cut the end off it and move this connector along to make this one and then i did the same thing i took a hacksaw to the design in eagle a virtual hacksaw cut it off moved this connector along and made that one so all three of these are actually designed from the same source schematic that simply had pieces deleted to make the shorter version and i've tested this i've tested this i have not yet assembled this but my confidence is fairly high that it is going to work when i assemble some and i've gone through and tested every input on every port and they all work and with the uh the the new firmware that does multi-press detection and long press detection all of that sort of thing it is working brilliantly so we at last have ourselves the basis of an updated version i should have done it this way of an updated version of the light switch controller now there are other parts to the thing there is the there needs to be the controller that talks to all of these via uh i squared c and the display and anything else that needs to go on the front panel so let's talk about the universal rack controller just briefly now the so when i did this i did this layout specifically because i was trying to copy the layout of a cobalt rack little one new servers and i used to use a few of them in my software business like in my internet business back in when would it have been what was like around 2001 ish give or take and i really like those little things they were kind of flawed in some ways but they they had style they were cool so what i did was i just copied the um the menu system like the way they had a little two-line character lcd this is an oled and i just copied this so it had up down left right navigation buttons and then it was select and enter i think were the two buttons here so with those six buttons you could navigate around menus and set the ip address and configure it basically so using the menu that is shown on the screen so when i did this i specifically set out to replicate the way the cobalt rack worked and that's why the layout ended up like this so we've got the the inputs in the middle here like a looking a bit like an ethernet switch even though it's not we've got ethernet coming in on the side which is passed through in this particular version going to whatever the board is back here and then that board could be an arduino it could be a raspberry pi it could be a like an esp32 baseboard that then talks about i squared c back to the interface board although right now you can see this isn't even plugged in yeah it talks back to the interface board and in fact the reason this isn't plugged in i think is because i was using it for testing this so if i just plug this into here i could probably get this working um what do i need i need an ethernet cable i need i've got an injector all right ethernet cable so i can plug ethernet into there i've got a poe injector just up here it's just slightly out of camera review so you can't quite see it and what i want to do i want to shove power into that injector okay i'm going to shove power into the injector it should wake up the board do i have power no oh i know why not it's because grab the wrong lead i want this one let's send 12 volts into it and now you can see that this has started up it's connected to ethernet and it'll be ready to read inputs from this so if i take my light my test light switch and plug it in here uh i can't even remember what broker or anything this is configured for at the moment so i'm going to slide back over to my computer and have a quick look [Music] i'm just going to before i reveal this because this one might be publishing to my real mqtt broker let's just see if i get anything coming up there am i getting button presses no it must be on my real mqtt broker so please indulge me for just a moment while i put my username and password in here uh it's a a moment where i thought maybe i'm sharing my screen and i'm not [Music] let's see if this works it does so i'm just gonna sorry i'm doing stuff while not talking all right just got to make sure that the password and everything is scrolled up off the screen yes it worked okay now i can go back to desktop view all right so what we've got here is a subscription to the topic uh well basically it's what i've had to do is i've done a wild card subscription and then i passed it through grep so i'm looking for the id of this controller so now if i press these buttons you'll see button events so buttons 9 10 11 and 12 are on here and you can see the event type is double or triple or single so where which way is it that way this should be button that is button nine single now i'll double press it oh penta quad double all right so there seems to be a little bit of unreliability with the timing but that saw it as a triple i just did a double and what i'm doing now is double presses two presses says it's quad two presses to penta two presses triple quad maybe because i'm not allowing enough of a gap between them so i wait a little while it's still saying penta okay but in any case you can see that it's detecting the different i'm just going to try a long press so press and hold let go press and hold yeah and i think there's a i i don't even know what different types it detects i thought there was a long press event but anyway it's doing different things needs a bit of debouncing yes all right yes i did kill off the internet for all of australia with a test so what you are seeing is switch events being reported through so this board right here that you can just see barely in the distance on the corner of the screen this is the 16 port version of the light switch controller and i've got a four port light switch plugged into it and it is publishing to mqtt and it's working uh yes so where were we my switch controller all right that's right i was talking about the universal rack controller so there's um uh there is where do i go with this time is just about up but i do want to mention this all right back to the overhead view now so what you've seen is this is working in terms of detecting button presses etc so let's just get out of that i'll pull a plug on this and mention this universal rack controller concept so my as i said this was originally inspired by the cobalt rack and [Music] what i wanted to do my the whole plan for this was to have the metal work and the control panel and the display so like buttons and when i say control panel i mean the display and the buttons as a board like this with some other device in the back here and then the inputs from the light switches but this could all be replaced the general idea with this was that it was kind of a framework for making rack mount home automation devices and using i squared c for internal communication so that this could be replaced by something different it doesn't have to be a light switch controller and um then there is hang on yes peter is bringing up lunch of course [Music] you know i feel like i've been making no sense whatsoever today you know sometimes it feels like i'm just talking and there are words coming out there is no continuity of what i'm talking about or what i'm thinking or what i'm trying to explain i'm just jumping around i'm just exiting out of a couple of things in the background here that's it okay now so i'm just gonna bring up another site but i'm doing this off um off screen again what i'm just trying to do is find something to show you but i may not be able to find it without a whole lot of messing around um no okay so the idea with this is i don't i think i will i think i will sorry i'm going way back in history here yes i'm doing stuff off the screen um i apologize but i'm just trying to get to something before that yeah kind of makes sense so i can do this before i wrap it up hmm no maybe not hmm no i'm not gonna find it okay before i go what i should do is see yes we all have those moments i think it's because peter is right and i need to go and get lunch um so christopher said can i put one of those racks online so we can submit firmware fixes to upload and then you can press buttons to test ah that's an interesting idea like an online test harness um what would be really cool would be if i put a web interface in front of it that did virtual button pressing as well now the firmware for it all if um any of you want to mess around with it uh dr is sorry i'm i have totally lost the plot here all right so the place to start is here this is the the light switch controller repo but the firmware that is in there is not the most up-to-date because there has been more development by ben and others so the um the place i'm going to bring this over and switch to desktop again so this is the repo for the light switch controller project and in this is the other design files for the three different versions of the board and there is also firmware including an out-of-date version of the usm firmware and where are we forks so if we go and have a look at um some of the boys so if i went to the wrong thing this one's what i want lse so ben's repo so the fork of my repo is seven commits ahead and it's got some more stuff in it so what i need to do is pull the changes into it but if you go to my copy of the repo as a starting point or you can go straight to here in fact i'll drop this url in as well benz is pretty much always ahead of mine because he's making ongoing changes to the code so what i'm running on mine right now i'm pretty sure he's out of date it's uh i need to merge his changes into my copy of the repo uh yeah so aaron said for the lsc logic board are you going to design a new board like cm4 based or pi or esp hat okay now that gets us to the the whole concept here and the [Music] i'm going to come back to back to overhead and rethinking how this all fits together this what you see right now came about by directly copying the front panel layout of a cobalt rack and that's not necessarily the best way to do it and so what happens is that so we've got the lan port over on the left the way i wanted it was that if you walk up to it you can access the control panel here and for yes this is kind of being right-handed biased i'm sorry if you're using your right hand to use the menus then the menus are visible on the display right here and then data connection comes in from the left and then all of the the i o is in the middle but what that means is that the control panel over here and the data connection over here are separated and that's not necessarily good so what i was thinking of doing was combining them and making a version right now this version has a direct pass-through this rj45 socket just passes through to this one and it doesn't do anything else there is no poe extraction there's nothing in here this is just a direct connection between these two sockets and that is purely so that there is a nice mechanical way to mount a socket in the front panel and then plug in whatever device you want in the back here and my original idea was that you could mount a raspberry pi in here or an arduino or whatever device you could put a nano itx motherboard in here if you wanted to and then just plug an ethernet cable into it to make this connection and then have another version of this that instead of having the pass-through it would have something like an esp32 just directly on here and in fact i've got a partial board layout for that but all of that has been scrapped because with this new version what it does is it has the sockets basically it forms this part of the board it doesn't have any of this pass-through part and that will end up being separate my original idea had been to make a single pcb that did everything but now i think it makes more sense to make it more modular so what i want to do is have i want to take this part of it move it over to this side so the the display will be on the left instead of on the right i'm probably going to get rid of all of these buttons as well because i'm not even sure that it makes sense to have menu physical menu buttons on a device like this anymore i think what it would make more sense to do is have over on the left we're going to have ethernet usb and a display and the usb can be used for either for configuration or it could be used for loading new firmware so what we'll end up with is on the left hand side here we will have this and this combined into a single board and then the right part of it will be where the i o goes so that's the general idea but it doesn't change any of this this works just fine these can go there or they can go across here and then i'm going to get updated metalwork done so all of this metalwork was designed in fusion 360 and then laser cut and folded at a place not far from me just 10 minutes down the road so i can get them to make a new version with the updated metal work all right i really need to follow peter's suggestion and [Music] get myself some lunch all right uh steven says doesn't it make more sense to move the input lan port to the right with the display maybe hmm and graham suggested might be worth having one button just for a quick reset button yeah i'm i'm definitely open to suggestions on all of this but this is where the um the universal rack controller concept comes into it so the idea is uh and this has been discussed before quite a few times the idea is this functional part the thing that makes this a light switch controller should not nothing should depend on that that could be replaced so things like the user interface and ethernet and the microcontroller and whatever else you want in there that could all stay the same and then you just replace whatever this board is and instead of it being a light switch controller it could be a an interface for security sensors or it could be i don't know an audio switching matrix or whatever you feel like making it could be interfaces for rs 485 or can bus or i don't know but the whole point is that the things that are common to all of these projects you should not have to do again you shouldn't have to do metal work again you shouldn't have to do the ethernet interface again shouldn't have to do power over ethernet you shouldn't have to do the display all of those things can be just a standard empty shell of a project waiting for whatever functional board you want to add into it to do the specific things that you want to do so it'll be like a template for making rack mount projects with the all of the common standard stuff communications power user interface metalwork those all done for you apart from possibly any custom holes that you might want to make for whatever your i o happens to be and then all you have to do is put in the portion of it that is specific to the project you want to build the rest of it is done yeah uh alrighty needs a paperclip hole for a reset um for a reset button yeah it saves you reaching around the back oh yeah and a power switch so that's another thing that might be worth putting on the front i was thinking of maybe having i think either a latching illuminated button which could be kind of cool or an illuminated rocker switch but then this is the thing where i end up in decision paralysis because there are so many different ways i could do this in many ways it makes sense to bring the power in from the back so with the next version of this case what i'm intending to do is make it not just a tray i'm intending to make it like a fully enclosed case with a lid that you can screw on so it'll have a back on it and what you could do is have a socket on the back and bring power in that way because in a lot of rack situations what you want to do is have power coming in here and then other connections from the front maybe that makes more sense i don't know maybe we could put power connections on both the front and the back and just blink the the sockets in parallel so you can use either anyway let's all let's talk about it um yeah but where i'm kind of being inspired by at the moment is unifi ethernet switch series 2 is kind of like um this oh i think i'm about to get the live stream is about to get a surprise visitor this is cool hang on i'm going to switch to the main camera because you will want to see the surprise visitor who's coming in lunch oh you brought me lunch oh look come on in come on in closer so andy has turned up with lunch for me and astra hello estrada astra is only just in the field of view need to come across a little bit more yeah oh hello uh no this is not lunch for me i think it's lunch for astra yes oh the atm okay so perfect timing aaron says hey andy um and astra says hello hello livestream uh so i'm just gonna switch to my desktop for just a moment because i wanted to show you the what i've been thinking about in terms of this this layout so where are we the series 2 switch which one that one no that's not yeah that is it so this particular unifi rack mount switch has the display on the left it's got ethernet ports on the right and then it's got some sfp sockets there but this is the way they've laid it out so what they've got is a little touch screen it's actually a square touch screen that goes on the there's a let's see if i can pull this image up and this has a very clean look so power for this comes in from the back and they've got this touch screen that you can use you can do things like display a qr code on it and then do augmented reality stuff it's all very fancy but i think we need a little bit more than that a screen is useful but and you can see they've got a power socket on the back but that takes mains power in it's not just like a 12 volt in or whatever anyway these are the sorts of things i've been looking at to try to come up with inspiration for how to set up the front panel for this um this universal rack controller project that can then be built into whatever it is you want to build so it is definitely lunchtime and i've got a dog to pat so i'm gonna go [Music] so thanks for coming along to a very random live stream today it's felt very random anyway and i'm going to sign off grab myself something to eat and drink and say hi to andy and astra and i will talk to you all really soon now because i don't have my scenes which are set i've got to manually end this live stream but anyway thank you very much for coming along oh seon you just got back just go back from where where did you go you should have been in the live stream the whole time not really all right see on say hello to astra you probably won't hear when astra came in the room oh hello yes i love you too so i'm going to end the live stream and go and play with astra and talk to andy bye everybody you

Channel: SuperHouseTV

Views: 2,844

Rating: 4.8208957 out of 5

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Id: ktTibCR4Vb4

Length: 138min 26sec (8306 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 03 2021