Node.js and Arduino - node.js

I am new to arduino, however I have experience in web development, lately I have been using, meteor js and the mean stack for different projects. I am open to trying any language though.
What I am trying to do is build a simple application to control the led on the arduino over the web.
I am working with another person and the arduino will be behind a firewall so I am not sure how to access it via the internet. I do have access to a arduino yun that I can use for testing at home which does have linio connected via bridge, which I dont quite understand what that does.
Ive also heard of this, https://www.yaler.net/ but would like to stay away from third party builds as much as possible if I can do it myself.
Whats the common way to do this with a arduino behind a firewall. and how do i do this with a arduino yun, is it easier with a yun?

So this is kind of a vague question, because we don't know exactly what your setup is and what's up with your firewall. But I'll try to help you out.
What I am trying to do is build a simple application to control the
led on the arduino over the web.
So this means you will need a web server running on the Arduino with a REST http client perhaps. You can easily find a dozen ways to do this by googling Arduino and REST, but here is one way you might go about it. Honestly though, I really wouldn't want to set up a REST server without a library.
From there, you simply set up a REST endpoint that when called, turns on the LED.
Whats the common way to do this with an Arduino behind a firewall.
This isn't remotely constrained to Arduinos. All (?) servers are behind a firewall. You will need to talk with your network administrator and have them open up the 80 port (for instance) and have it forward the call on the public port to the local Arduino server.
is it easier with a yun?
It doesn't matter what Arduino board you're running. It obviously has to have an ethernet or wireless port/shield but otherwise it doesn't matter.
I shouldn't even bring up the fact that googling "arduino rest controlled led" brought this link up... Besides the firewall, that appears to be exactly what you're looking for or will at least get you going.

Related

Make ROS independent from wlan connection with new network inteface

I am starting ROS on Ubuntu 20 on Raspberry PI with setting ROS_HOSTNAME to $(hostname).local and ROS_MASTER_URI to http://$(hostname):11311.
The problem is that if I am connected to WiFi and then that connection fails (for example if WiFi goes out of range), then the robot stops working correctly.
I was thinking that a possible solution could be to create a new network interface or a VLAN and start ROS on that network and then bridge that new network to wlan interface. This would make the network that the ROS is connected to independent from wlan interface, but it would still have access to network if wlan would be online. I would also like to keep the possibility to connect to robot's ROS through another device on the wlan network.
I am asking here for help because I don't have enough networking knowledge to make this work. So any guidelines would be appreciated. If there is another better approach to solving this problem, please let me know.
I suggest using ros_bridge for communication with the robot. It is often used if you have a web interface for your robot and you need to visualize some data from the robot's backend on the web. Or even send a command to the robot.
The counterpart to this node is the roslibjs library. You can find it here
For more info, you can check Robot Web Tools, a collection of tools for web-based robot apps.
However, maybe you are not interested in web apps; you can still use ros_bridge with roslibpy which is python implementation of rosbridge protocol. It is the same as roslibjs, but this uses python instead of javascript.
You can easily create a python app which will use roslibpy to subscribe or publish to topics or call services.
This approach is better because you will encapsulate your robotic backend, and you can control what is visible to the outside world with params for the ros_bridge node. You can also handle better reconnects if your robot lost wifi connection.
Still, you can use exposed ROS_MASTER_URI for rviz and debug proposes, but I wouldn't try to use it for controlling the robot because the connection between nodes won't be recreated if you lose wifi connection.
In my work, we used ros_bridge for some time in production AMR, and I have to say that it wasn't as robust as I thought initially. For example, there were issues when the robot changed the wifi access points, and caching messages didn't behave according to the documentation. For the web, we still use it but to control a fleet of mobile robots, we had to abandon it, and we developed our solution based on rabbitmq.
But I guess that if you are using Raspberry Pi, then it is not a production robot, and therefore I think you should be OK with ros_bridge.

Stream audio from place 1 to place 2 over the internet

So I'm kinda stuck here.
I have a radio station, but we are mobile. So I have a studio on wheels. The problem is, we have an antenna, but we always have to place that really close to our studio. Now I want to make an device that can stream the audio from the audio mixer to the internet and can be received by another device in another network and send that signal to the antenna (audio output).
to make this clear, I made a schema with raspberry pi's;
I want this to be plug and play So I only have to plug in the device in the modem (or network we have) on both sides and the devices should find each other.
I don't know HOW I can do this, so I need to know a couple of things:
What hardware should I use?
What software should I use?
What is the best configuration to accomplish this?
Can I use 2 raspberry pi's?
How can I let the devices find each other over the internet?
There need to be some features;
The system needs to be able to buffer the audio for 5-10 seconds
It needs to be direct, so it's live and not a file that needs to be played
The system must be failless (beside the fact the internet can die).
Plug and play is a must, I don't want to have a really messy configuration to do. (if possible, without any kind of portforwarding).
I would really appreciate help and a decent explaination.
regards,
Robin
Well, it depends on your capabilities as a programmer.
If you're really fixated on the RPi for it's convenient form factor, there's a ton of community support, so I'd start with something like this project to kick start you in the right direction. If you already know python pretty well, modify away and have fun.
If you have no programming experience, you'll probably want to put a desktop in place of the RPi and launch some instances of VLC. It's not necessarily plug n play, but you can get close enough by getting a command line VLC to launch at startup.
Either way, the more difficult problem here is the "over the internet" part. This would really need to be a server-client model, but who is your server depends on who is more stationary (I'm guessing Location 2?) because the client will need to know the IP address of the server somehow. There are dozens of ways to make this happen, but at the end of the day, you'll want to use sockets accomplish the
It needs to be direct, so it's live and not a file
... which unfortunately gets complicated. See this answer for confirmation. Would love to help with some tips on implementation, but we need more information about your willingness to "dig into the code", the necessity of the RPi, and whether the stationary location has a static web address.

Hardware for Prototyping a Works-With-Nest Device

does anyone know of a hardware platform that is appropriate to use in prototyping a device that has the ambition to become WWN? I have looked at Proton/Spark-Core, but is there something out there that may be more appropriate/compatible with the Nest-API? Thanks.
Basically anything that can run a web service. All you'll need to do is make an HTTP GET and PUT over HTTPS. More advanced things like Firebase and REST Streaming can still be easily done with a Raspberry Pi. I'm pretty sure an Arduino with a mini-web server can handle GETS and PUTS.

Simple Universal Plug and Play ( uPNP ) to find Raspberry Pi on Network

I have a RaspberryPi connected to my home network via WiFi with a dynamic ip address. I then have my iPhone connected to the same network also via WiFi. The Pi has a lightweight c++ HTTP server running on it that can execute commands. I now want to write an Objective-C app that can find the Pi on the network, regardless of it's ip address, and send it commands. So, Universal Plug and Play seems like the logical solution - but everything I find on Google is dealing with Media players and streaming audio/video content.
I just want the Pi to somehow simply broadcast on my network - "Hey, I'm RasberryPi and my IP Address is 192.168.0.5!".
Can somebody please suggest a package or solution to this problem? Thanks!
For the RPi side I would suggest GUPnP as long as you can fulfill the dependency requirements. It's a very modular framework so you don't need to load or use any of the multimedia related things if you don't need them. It's based on glib and libsoup and allows you to fairly easily define and implement your own UPnP services. Take a look at the BinaryLight example: It implements a BinaryLight Device that contains a SwitchPower service with several methods and two state variables (properties). You should be able to hit the ground running if you start with that. There's documentation on how to write a server.
The components you are going to need/want:
libgssdp, handles discovery, used by gupnp
libgupnp, the actual upnp implementation, used by your app
the dependencies (glib, gio, gmodule, libsoup, libxml)
Also possibly for testing (this on a desktop linux machine since it requires gtk):
gupnp-tools, contains gupnp-universal-cp
EDIT: If you really don't want to implement any UPnP functionality, it's possible you could just use GSSDP for the IP discovery. This could be very simple: see test-publish example.

Controlling an Arduino over the web with the lowest latency

I have an Arduino board in a location, and a webserver.
I also have a website that is supposed to control the Arduino. What technique would allow users to take control of the Arduino board with the least amount of latency?
I have Node.js, socketserver, Jabber in mind to experiment with, but is this the right direction?
You should have a look at Socket.IO for implementing WebSockets on server- and client-side.
There's a great project called duino for accessing Arduino with Node.js, you "only" have to pipe all communication through WebSockets.
Update: In the meantime I have published a framework for sending commands to an Arduino with Node.JS, JavaScript and WebSockets. Make sure to have a look at Noduino!
I had good luck using node-serialport to talk to the Arduino. Using the serial port results in very low latency, and I used it to build a photobooth. The code is on GitHub if you want to check it out, though it's very poorly organized as I was rushing to get this done for my wedding and well... corners were cut.

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