New GPIO nodes for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and lots of others including i2c support

[Luis Montes]

I thought it would be fun to try a different approach to what we currently have for hardware support in node-red.

The open source Johnny-Five project has had a flurry of activity in the last year to get new types of hardware supported.  This started with the nodebots movement and node-serialport connecting to Arduinos, but now includes support for new hardware in the form of IO plugins.

It makes sense to leverage the nodebots community and use the IO plugins directly in node-red.

So, I've created node-red-contrib-gpio which is a new set of input and outputs similar to the existing Arduino nodes and now including i2c support.

More information about the new nodes is here:  https://github.com/monteslu/node-red-contrib-gpio

Currently supported hardware:

Arduino/Firmata

Raspberry Pi

BeagleBone Black

Galileo/Edison

Blend Micro

LightBlue Bean

Electirc Imp

Spark Core

 Others can be added very easily.

A copule more things of note:

The johnny-five developers are currently planning SPI support, so as soon as that get finished I'll add support for it in these nodes.

Also, these nodes aren't strictly required to connect to local hardware.  I've included the ability to connect to remote hardware via TCP sockets or MQTT connections.  More info on how that works is here:  blog.iceddev.com/2014-12-05-remotebots-cutting-the-cord-with-remote-io.html

[Dave C-J]

+1 - Great idea

[Andrew Lindsay]

Nice, was looking for an I2C node for a particular device I'm using but in the end I'm using exec to run a command line application due to the complex nature of the device and the volume of data being passed to it. I'd still like to try a direct I2C node without having to go through the extra steps of calling the executable each time.

Cheers

Andrew

[austin sandford]

Very nice. I've installed it on a Galileo v1 and is much faster to build with than Intels IoT stuff (blinking LED takes seconds to create and deploy)

One question tho', how do I access the serial pins?

Thanks once again, great stuff (installed it on my Pi2 as well)

[Luis Montes]

Thanks for giving it a shot.  I didn't actually test it on Galileo, but good to see that the theory it would work turned out well :)

I'm not really all that familiar with Galileo.  Are there certain pins that have serial functionality?  Is it possible that those pins will show a serial device in the /dev filesystem when something is attached?

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[austin sandford]

It shouldbehave like an Arduino, so serial on pins 0 and 1, but they might be available under /dev as serial devices.

[Luis Montes]

StandardFirmata on the Arduino typically uses a serial device as input, but doesn't do anything special for pins 0 and 1 that it exposes with firmata calls as far as I know.  I think you'll need custom sketch to attach something else to the board if you want it to communicate from it to another device over the serial pins. There is however i2c support available that you may or may not be able to use from these nodes to achieve something similar depending on your use case.

[Dave C-J]

Downstream serial support on the client is subject to discussion and work in progress... but has been there a while...

see

https://github.com/firmata/arduino/issues/97

and

https://github.com/kraman/go-firmata/commit/e7742e31a69a2e1f9731db22d5cc27b5c994d0a3

[Luis Montes]

If you're using this with a raspberry pi, you now have i2c support available, just make sure to install the latest raspi-io

I made a flow to show how to use this http://flows.nodered.org/flow/f8c7a94454f79d3cfdc5

It uses an inexpensive mpu6050 accelerometer/gyro/temperature sensor.

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[denni...@gmail.com]

Hi Luis,

This looks really cool but I'm struggling to understand how to make it work. I'm hoping you might be able to point out where I'm going wrong. 

I'm using an Edison with the Sparkfun GPIO board and can turn on an LED manually using `echo 1 > /sys/classes/gpio/gpio14/value`. However nothing seems to happen when using this module - say injecting a 1 or 0 into a gpio out on the same pin (the /sys/classes/gpio/gpio14/value stays the same).

I also get no result running the following with Node (I'd expect it to blink on and off every half-second):

var five = require("johnny-five");

var Edison = require("galileo-io");

var board = new five.Board({

  io: new Edison()

});

board.on("ready", function() {

  console.log("READY");

  var byte = 0;

  

  setInterval(function() {

    board.digitalWrite(14, (byte ^= 1));

  }, 500);

});

Cheers,

Dennis.

[Luis Montes]

I haven't actually done any testing with galileo-io, but if something is preventing the johnny-five code from working, the same problem would be present in this node-red node.

Which sparkfun board are you using specifically?  It's possible that galileo-io only supports whatever is onboard, and not additional pins from a breakout board.  The galileo-io example uses pin 9, could you give that a shot?

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[Dennis]

Hi Luis, I'm using this board - https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/sparkfun-blocks-for-intel-edison---gpio-block?_ga=1.28720700.1418046343.1428462829 . As far as I can tell there's no pin 9.

I think the problem is probably in johnny-five or the galileo-io modules. The documentation for galileo-io doesn't mention sparkfun gpio boards; but it looks like what it's doing should work. There's a few things I'm unclear on though so I'll contact the johnny-five dev as well.

Thanks!

-Dennis

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[Hans Jespersen]

I have both Johnny-Five and Cylon working using galileo-io with an Intel Edison with the Arduino breakout board and Grove Start Kit sensors.

I also have a Sparkfun Edison with the GPIO block (and a lot of the other goodies) but I have not yet hooked anything up to my GPIO block. Let me know if you want me to test for any differences between J5 or galileo-io on the two different breakout boards. I do remember seeing some talk about one of the sparkfun GPIO pins being stuck low but I can't remember which bulletin board it was on. I will post back if I find it

-hans

[Hans Jespersen]

Looking at the mapping between the Arduino Shield PINs and the Native Edison PINs it's not clear if you need to use PIN 14 (GPIO) or PIN 44 (Linux) with galileo-io

http://www.emutexlabs.com/project/215-intel-edison-gpio-pin-multiplexing-guide

The yocto linux device drivers and the mraa libraries use the Edison pinouts.

[Dennis]

Hi guys. After some looking I found the following table showing how the Edison pins are labelled in MRAA: 

http://iotdk.intel.com/docs/master/mraa/edison.html

This was the info I was missing. Tested and this works (my LED flashes!). It's not very bright but I'll investigate that with a multimeter.

[Luis Montes]

Awesome.  Glad its working.

As for the dim LED, you might need to make sure you have the latest version of node-red-contrib-gpio

On an earlier version I was accidentally setting pin mode to PWM instead of Digital mode in some cases.  May or may not be the problem here, but worth a check.

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[Hans Jespersen]

The dim led might just be because it's 3.3V. The other Edison breakout boards level shift to 5V.

[Blue Collar Ingenuity]

Hi Luis

The johnny-five developers are currently planning SPI support, so as soon as that get finished I'll add support for it in these nodes.

I know I'm getting a little ahead of myself. Arriving any day is a  MAX6675 Module + K Type Thermocouple and a bunch of NodeMcu Lua ESP8266 WIFI Internet Development Board. 

The goal is to use the thermocouple to report my woodstove temperature over wifi with MQTT to NR. That's the goal! 

One of the primary things I would like to learn is how to directly connect the module and thermocouple directly to my PI IO. I'm struggling to find instructions on SPI setup with NR. Is this possible? 

Jeff 

[Julian Knight]

What would be really cool (or hot actually!) would be the ability to power the whole thing from the heat output of the stove :)

[Luis Montes]

SPI isn't yet supported with johnny-five and its IO classes including raspi-io.  The pi has hardware spi, so you could in theory write a script that can be called from the exec node.

As far as ESP integration with node robotics goes, there's a ton happening in that space.  Right now you can use the esp as a serial gateway to relay data from tcp or udp as described here: https://gist.github.com/ajfisher/5fe60fe7d8c49b3223f0  

node-red-contrib-gpio has support for that if you relay to something that can run firmata like an arduino uno.

Really looking forward to seeing an esp firmware that can speak firmata over mqtt with gpio access locally :)

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[Blue Collar Ingenuity]

What would be really cool (or hot actually!) would be the ability to power the whole thing from the heat output of the stove :)

This has potential :)  

[Swapan Sarkar]

Any update on SPI support ?

[Luis Montes]

Some very good news on this front.

Jeff Hoefs (@soundanalogous)  has been working on getting SPI into the firmata protocol:  https://github.com/firmata/protocol/pull/27  as well as the arduino implementation: https://github.com/firmata/arduino/pull/341

Firmata.js support will likely happen as soon as the protocol and arduino implementations are ready.  This is where using johnny-five really shines.  Since firmata.js is the basis of johnny-five IO adapters, the other IO adapters such as raspi-io and beaglebone, etc.  will have a target API to also expose SPI support.

And I'll get this into the gpio nodes as soon as it lands :)

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