Generic Serial Plugin

[mishoboss]

Hi, is there a generic serial plugin? Seems there isn't one, and this is a key feature, especially for DIY projects like Arduino.

[mknx]

Hi,

no there is no generic plugin. What should it do? You have to implement some kind of protocol for the communication. And reading/writing to the serial interface is quite simple. See the dmx plugin as a reference.

so long

Marcus

[mishoboss]

Hi,
it would be useful for all kind of serial communications (rs-232, rs-485, etc.). Controlling serial devices via ASCII protocol, receiving strings from the serial bus, etc. Also if a regular expression is applied above the serial, it could be used to parse the received string to useful data and feed bool or numeric items.

For example I have made a DIY Arduino based thermostat, that communicate over serial via custom very simple ASCII protocol (e.g. zone1_heating=on\n - turns ON the heating on Zone 1). The device sends data of type "zone1_temp=23.5\n", "zone2_humidity=64\n", etc.

[mishoboss]

Is there any progress in that issue? Is there any solution to the example I gave? How you deal with custom Arduino hardware?

[mknx]

I don't use an arduino, so I don't have to deal with it. Right now: if you want a plugin, you have to write it by yourself.

[mishoboss]

Thanks for the answer. Actually the idea is to have a generic serial plugin and to provide the protocol mapping as a regex, so it could be highly reusable with any ASCII serial hardware. I'm not sure if I could do this, as I'm not a python guy at all, but I could try if you provide some bootstrapping. Can I start by modifying some of the existing plugins that use serial communication? Which one would you reccomend?