Mouser PSoC 6-WiFi-BT L8: Integrate WiFi and AWS Into the Game

Designing low-power, cloud-connected IoT devices with PSoC® 6 MCU’s and WICED® Wi-Fi/Bluetooth

# Lesson
0 Introduction
1 Developer Resources
2 WICED Studio & CapSense
3 Using the CY8CKIT-028-TFT Shield
4 The Video Game
5 GoBle & Bluetooth
6 Integrate GoBle Bluetooth into the Game
7 Implement WiFi and AWS
8 Integrate WiFi and AWS Into the Game

Summary

In this lesson we will move the subscriber app functionality into the main GameBle project (now called GameBleAws).  In order to do this, you need to turn the subscriber into a thread, and fix it so that messages that are sent to the PADDLE topic get turned into messages that can be sent to the paddleQueue.

To implement this lesson I will follow these steps:

  1. Create a New Project starting from L6GameBle
  2. Copy over subscriber.c and wifi_config_dct.h
  3. Update the Makefile
  4. Create subscriber.h
  5. Update main.c
  6. Update subscriber.c
  7. Test

Create a New Project

Copy and paste the L6GameBle project into a new project called L8GameBleAws using Copy/Paste

Create a new Make target for the GameBleAws project

Copy subscriber.c & wifi_config_dct.h

Use copy/paste to make a copy of the subscriber application and paste it into the GameBleAws project.  Once done your folder should look like this:

Update the Makefile

Create subscriber.h

In order for the main.c to know about the awsThread (which is the former application_start of subscriber.c) you should create a file called subscriber.h.  Then you should define the awsThread function to match the wiced_thread_t function prototype (just a function that takes a wiced_thread_arg and returns void).

Update main.c

To integrate the awsThread thread into your main project you need to add the “subscriber.h” to the includes:

Add a new variable to hold the awsThreadHandle.

Finally you should launch the AWS thread by creating it with wiced_rtos_create_thread.

Update subscriber.c

In order for subscriber.c to be useful you need to fix the includes, send the messages from the PADDLE topic to the game thread, and turn application_start into a thread.  Start by fixing the includes (just like we did in the BLE Example in Lesson 6)

When you get a message to the PADDLE topic, you should parse it, then send a message to the game thread to move the paddle.  You do this exactly the same way as you did in the BLE project.  Notice that I protect the game thread by making sure it send a value less than 100.

Test

I don’t really have a good program (like the GoBle) to test moving the paddle live.  But you can see that when the game is over, you can still move the paddle using AWS console.  In the screen shot below you can see that I moved the paddle to position 0.  And you can see that the BLE started at the same time as AWS.  Score.

Mouser PSoC 6-WiFi-BT L7 : Implement WiFi and AWS

Designing low-power, cloud-connected IoT devices with PSoC® 6 MCU’s and WICED® Wi-Fi/Bluetooth

# Lesson
0 Introduction
1 Developer Resources
2 WICED Studio & CapSense
3 Using the CY8CKIT-028-TFT Shield
4 The Video Game
5 GoBle & Bluetooth
6 Integrate GoBle Bluetooth into the Game
7 Implement WiFi and AWS
8 Integrate WiFi and AWS Into the Game

Summary

In this lesson I am going to update one of the predefined application which we deliver as part of WICED Studio which knows how to connect to the AWS IoT Cloud to work on my network.  This will demonstrate WiFi and MQTT.  I will also fix the application so that it knows about a new MQTT Topic called “PADDLE” which will be used to send messages to move the game paddle.

To implement this project I will:

  1. Copy the subscriber from demo/aws/iot/pub_sub/subscriber
  2. Setup a “thing” on AWS and download the certificates
  3. Update the certificates in the WICED installation
  4. Update the project with my AWS configuration
  5. Test
  6. Update the project to be compatible with the Game
  7. Test

Copy Subscriber & Fix the Makefile

The first thing that I will do is copy/paste the subscriber application which can be found at demo/aws/iot/pub_sub/subscriber into my folder.  I will also rename the project to L7subscriber. Once that is done it should look like this:

Then you need to edit the Makefile to update the name of the project.

Go to Amazon.com and Create a “thing”

In order to connect to the AWS cloud you need to create a “thing”.  Go to the AWS console and click “Create”

We are just going to create one thing.  So, click “Create a single thing”

Give it a name, in this case Mouser.

AWS has device level security which is implemented with RSA certificates for each device.  So,  you need to let AWS create a certificate for you.

Once that is done download the device certificate and the two keys.  You need to 100% make sure you do this now, because you wont get another chance. I’m also going to activate the certificate once I have the certificate and keys.

Now attach a policy to your thing.  I already have the “ww101_policy” setup.

The policy looks like this.  Basically, things are wide open.

Update the Certificates

The last thing that you need is the most recent AWS certificate.  WICED expects that you use the RSA2048 bit key.

Now that you have the four security documents., you need to integrate them into your WICED installation.  To do this, change directories to ~/Documents/WICED-Studio-6.2/43xxx_Wi-Fi/resources/apps/aws/iot  Then copy the files, and then make symbolic links.  If you are not on a Mac or Linux then just copy the files and rename them appropriately.

Update the Project

AWS creates a virtual machine and runs an MQTT server on that machine.  You can find out the DNS name of that machine on the settings screen.  Here you can see my endpoint.  You will need to configure the WICED project to talk to your server.

You need to change the actual endpoint of your MQTT server in the AWS cloud on line 119

In the file wifi_config_dct.h you will need to change the CLIENT_AP_SSID and CLIENT_AP_PASSPHRASE for your network

Test

In order to test the project you will need to create a make target and program your development kit.

Once that is done you can go to the Amazon.com test console and send MQTT messages to the correct topic.

Here you can see the project attached to my network.  And successfully received the LIGHT ON message.

Update the Project for the Game

We know that the game doesn’t care about the LIGHT topic so, let’s change it to PADDLE.

And let’s assume that messages to the paddle topic are ASCII numbers <100.  So, we can parse the message and print it out.  Notice that I used sscanf to parse the message and we all know that is super dangerous.

Test

After making those updates let’s program the whole shooting match again.  Then test by sending some messages to the PADDLE topic.

It’s good.  Things are working.

Mouser PSoC6-WiFi-BT L6 : Integrate GoBle Bluetooth into the Game

Designing low-power, cloud-connected IoT devices with PSoC® 6 MCU’s and WICED® Wi-Fi/Bluetooth

# Lesson
0 Introduction
1 Developer Resources
2 WICED Studio & CapSense
3 Using the CY8CKIT-028-TFT Shield
4 The Video Game
5 GoBle & Bluetooth
6 Integrate GoBle Bluetooth into the Game
7 Implement WiFi and AWS
8 Integrate WiFi and AWS Into the Game

Summary

At this point we have a working BLE Remote Control and a working Game.  In this lesson I’ll merge the two projects together so that the GoBle remote control will be able to control the game paddle.  It will do this by creating messages (just like the CapSense messages) and sending them to the Game thread via the paddleQueue.  And it will send “Button0” messages when “Button A” is pressed.

To implement this lesson I will follow these steps:

  1. Copy everything into a new project
  2. Modify the Makefile
  3. Modify main.c
  4. Create a new make target
  5. Test it all to make sure things are still working
  6. Modify GoBleThread.c
  7. Program and Test

Copy L4Game into a new project L6GameBle

Use “copy” and “paste” to create a new project, when you paste give it the name “L6GameBle” (there is an error in the screenshot)

Copy the files GoBle_db.c/h, GoBleThread.c/h, and wiced_bt_cfg.c from the GoBle project into your new GameBle project.  After that is done your project should look like this:

Modify the Makefile

  1. Change the name of the App to “App_WStudio_L6GameBle”
  2. Add the new source files
  3. Add the BLE Library “libraries/drivers/bluetooth/low_energy”

Modify main.c

Add the include for the GeBleThread.

In the application_start function add a call GoBleThread_start() to get the GoBle thread going

Create a new make target

Test it all to make sure things are still working

Run the make target and make sure that the game still plays and that you can get remote control messages.

Modify GoBleThread.c

Add the includes for the GameThread (to get access to the game message structure) and SystemGlobal (to get access to the queue)

I don’t need (or want) the button/slider printout information.  So I will delete the old button code from goble_event_handler. (delete this stuff)

Now, update the code to send the slider and button information to the GameThread (via the paddleQueue).  You may have noticed that the slider on GoBle gives you 0->0xFF and the direction is the inverse from the game we setup.  So, I will scale the value to 100 and invert it so that the controller moves the paddle the right way on line 143.  The message format is exactly the same as what we setup for the CapSense.  This means the CapSense slider works at the same time as the GoBle controller.

Program and Test

Mouser PSoC6-WiFi-BT L4 : The Video Game

Designing low-power, cloud-connected IoT devices with PSoC® 6 MCU’s and WICED® Wi-Fi/Bluetooth

# Lesson
0 Introduction
1 Developer Resources
2 WICED Studio & CapSense
3 Using the CY8CKIT-028-TFT Shield
4 The Video Game
5 GoBle & Bluetooth
6 Integrate GoBle Bluetooth into the Game
7 Implement WiFi and AWS
8 Integrate WiFi and AWS Into the Game

Summary

In this lesson I’ll finish the video game thread by adding the graphics etc. to play the game.  In addition I’ll fix up the CapSense thread so that it is connected to the game via an RTOS queue.

There are three main things going on in this game.

  1. A state machine for the game screen (Splash, Start, Running, Over)
  2. A 20ms timer that updates the screen while the game is running (moves the Paddle and the Ball)
  3. A GUI queue where the rest of the system – CapSense,  Bluetooth and WiFi – can send Button and Paddle messages.

To implement this project I will:

  1. Setup the project and makefile by copying L3CapSenseTft
  2. Update gamethread.h to define the GUI queue messages
  3. Fix main.c to create the queue
  4. Create SystemGlobal.h to give the rest of the files access to the gui queue
  5. Updating the CapSenseThread to send GUI messages
  6. Update the includes in GameThread.c
  7. Add some #define macros to define game parameters
  8. Add a State Machine for the game & define some paddle movement methods
  9. Make forward declarations for the thread functions
  10. Create some variables to maintain game state
  11. Add display functions for the score and the speed
  12. Add functions to start and end the game
  13. Add helper functions to calculate the top and bottom of the paddle
  14. Add a function to update and draw the paddle
  15. Add a function to update and draw the ball
  16. Add a function for the game timer to call
  17. Update the main game thread

Setup the project and makefile by copying L3CapSenseTft

Use copy/paste to copy the L3CapSenseTft project to a new folder name L4Game.   Change the name of the makefile to be L4Game.mk.

Edit the makefile and change the name of the application.

Create a make target for this project

Update GameThread.h to Define the GUI Messages

All of the threads in the system (CapSense, Bluetooth, and WiFi) will control the paddle and the button by sending messages to an RTOS queue.  In gameThread.h we will add a definition of that message.  The message is just a structure with two values – which GUI element and what value to send.

Fix main.c to Create the Queue

I typically believe that the RTOS primitives should be owned by the main.c.  To do this edit main.c and fix the includes.

Then define the queue variable “paddleQueue” which I should have names “guiQueue” but it is way to late to fix it now — oh well.

Create the queue

Create SystemGlobal.h

Each of the threads in the system need to have access to the paddleQueue.  In order to do that create a file called SystemGlobal.h and extern the variable to give them that access.

Updating the CapSenseThread to send GUI messages

Remember that when we setup the CapSenseThread originally, it just printed out the values.  Let’s fix it so send messages.  So, edit CapSenseThread.c.

  1. Add a message variable (line 8)
  2. Fix the button0 and button 1 to make and send RTOS messages (lines 20/21 and 26/27)
  3. Fix the slider to send the position (lines 33-35)

Update the includes in GameThread.c

Now let’s fix GameThread.c.  Start by editing the includes to add a new file called “SystemGlobal.h” which contains the global variable for the GUI queue.

Add some #define macros in GameThread.c

There are a number of constants which I use in the game.  In this section I use #define macros to define them.

Add a State Machine for the Game & Define Paddle Movement

Open up GameThread.c – all of the game control functions will go there.

There will be four screens in the game.  A splash screen to display Cypress and Mouser, a Ready Player 1 Screen, the actual game screen and a game over screen.

In addition the paddle can move a little bit at a time (increment) or jump directly to the position (absolute)

Fix the gameState statemachine

In the splash screen I need to set the state machine to GS_SPLASH

In the start screen I need to set the state machine to GS_START

Make Forward Declarations for Functions

You should define the functions in advance of using them

Create some variables to maintain game state

The updateScreenTimer is used while the game is running to call the updateScreen every 20ms.  The rest of the variables are self explanatory.

Add Display Functions for the Score & Speed

These two functions print the speed and score at the top of the screen.

Add Function to Start the Game

When the game needs to start you:

  1. Reset the score
  2. Set the paddle position
  3. Move the ball to the middle of the paddle
  4. Set the ball to move to the right and down
  5. Clear the screen, display score and speed
  6. Start the game running

Add Function to End the Game

When the game is over you should:

  1. Move the game state to over
  2. Stop the timer
  3. Display game over
  4. Display press button 0 to start

Add Helper Functions to Calculate Paddle Top & Bottom

There are two places where you need to know the position of the Paddle.  Specifically:

  1. To draw the paddle
  2. To figure out if the ball hit the paddle or not.

These two functions calculate the pixel position of the top and bottom of the paddle based on it current position

Add a Function to Update & Draw the Paddle

While the game is running you need the paddle to move.  There are two methods:

  1. Absolute just moves the current position immediately to the desired position.
  2. Incremental, which moves the paddle a little bit towards the desired position.

Add a function to update and draw the ball

You need a function to:

  1. Move the ball
  2. Figure out if it hit the right/left/top/bottom of the screen and do the right thing.

When the ball hits one of those surfaces it needs to change direction to either plus or minus.

Every time it hits the paddle the score should increase and possibly speed up.

If it misses the paddle the game is over.

Create a Function for the Game Timer

An RTOS timer runs every 20ms.  That timer needs a function to move the paddle and move the ball.

Update the Main Game Thread

The main game thread needs to get messages out of the queue and then do the right thing based on the game state.

Program and Test

Now that it is all done… program and test it.

GameThread.c

Here is the whole thread is here so you can copy/paste it into your file.

 

Mouser PSoC 6-WiFi-BT L3: Using the CY8CKIT-028-TFT Shield

Designing low-power, cloud-connected IoT devices with PSoC® 6 MCU’s and WICED® Wi-Fi/Bluetooth

# Lesson
0 Introduction
1 Developer Resources
2 WICED Studio & CapSense
3 Using the CY8CKIT-028-TFT Shield
4 The Video Game
5 GoBle & Bluetooth
6 Integrate GoBle Bluetooth into the Game
7 Implement WiFi and AWS
8 Integrate WiFi and AWS Into the Game

Summary

In this lesson we will start making the game.  The first thing that it will need is a display and we will use the CY8CKIT-028-TFT.  In order to talk to the display we will use a library built into WICED called ugui.  That library needs a driver configuration which we will copy of out the code example we provide.  Finally we will start building a thread called the “GameThread” which will actually make up the game.

  1. Download CE222494_PSoC6_WICED_WiFi
  2. Copy the L2CapSense into L3CapSenseTft
  3. Copy cy_tft_display.c/h into the project
  4. Make a file GameThread.h
  5. Make a file GameThread.c
  6. Rename L2CapSense.mk to be L3CapSenseTft.mk & Fix
  7. Update main.c
  8. Test

Download CE222494_PSoC6_WICED_WiFi

If you click on the CY8CKIT-062-WiFi-BT webpage you will find that there are a bunch of files which are associated with the development kit, including CY8CKIT-062-WiFi-BT PSoC® 6 WiFi-BT Pioneer Kit Code Examples.zip.

Download that folder, then copy the directory into your WICED Studio Apps/WStudio folder.

Once you do that it should look like this:

Copy L3CapSense into L3CapSenseTft

Now copy/paste the L2CapSense project into a new project called L3CapSenseTft

Copy cy_tft_display.c/h into the project

Open up the CE222494 code example directory and copy the two files cy_tft_display.c andcy_tft_display.c which are drivers for the ugui library and then paste them into your new project L3CapSenseTft.

Make a file GameThread.h

Create a new file called GamThread.h and a definition of the GameThread which will be used by the main.c to get the game thread going.

Make a file GameThread.c

Now create a file called GameThread.c it will have 5 functions.  Here is the whole file to make it simpler to copy and paste, but Ill explain each function one by one

The main game thread function is: void gameThread(wiced_thread_arg_t arg).  This function

  1. Initializes the TFT
  2. Initializes the UGUI library
  3. Clears the screen (by setting it all black)
  4. Sets the colors to draw white on black
  5. Displays the splash screen (which takes 2 seconds)
  6. Displays the start screen
  7. Waits until the end of time

The function displaySplashScreen simply sets the font, then draws 4 text strings, then waits for a few seconds… then moves on

The displayStartScreen put the “Ready Player 1 on the screen” and then tells the user to press the B0 to start the game.

The U8G_PutString function uses coordinates x and y to set the upper left of the text.  For formatting purposes it is easier for me to think about the middle of the string.  This function just calculates the upper left (x,y) given the middle center (x,y).  To do this you need to also know the (x,y) size of the font.

static void UG_PutStringCenter(uint32_t x, uint32_t y, uint32_t fontx, uint32_t fonty,char *string)

Rename L2CapSense.mk to be L3CapSenseTft.mk & Fix

To make this build we need to modify the makefile to know about the new thread as well as the tft driver.  In addition we need to tell the linker to link with the graphics library.

Update main.c

In main.c I will:

  1. Include the GameThread.h
  2. Add a variable to hold the gameThreadHandle
  3. Then start the gameThread

Test

Now it is ready to test.  So create a Make Target, then Build and Program.  Hopefully you are now Ready Player 1.

 

Mouser PSoC 6-WiFi-BT L2 : WICED Studio & CapSense

Designing low-power, cloud-connected IoT devices with PSoC® 6 MCU’s and WICED® Wi-Fi/Bluetooth

# Lesson
0 Introduction
1 Developer Resources
2 WICED Studio & CapSense
3 Using the CY8CKIT-028-TFT Shield
4 The Video Game
5 GoBle & Bluetooth
6 Integrate GoBle Bluetooth into the Game
7 Implement WiFi and AWS
8 Integrate WiFi and AWS Into the Game

Summary

In this lesson we will build your first WICED Studio project (the blinking LED)  and make sure that you can program the development kit.  Then we will update the project to include a thread for managing the CapSense block.  This thread will be carried into the other projects.

To implement this lesson I will follow these steps:

  1. Start WICED Studio 6.2
  2. Select 43xxx
  3. Create a folder called L2CapSense
  4. Create main.c and build a blinking LED thread
  5. Create L2CapSense.mk
  6. Create a make target
  7. Build Program and test it
  8. Create CapSenseThread.c
  9. Create CapSenseThread.h
  10. Update main.c
  11. Update the makefile
  12. Build Program and Test

Create the L2CapSense Folder

Create main.c

Right click on the folder and create a new file.  Name it L2CapSense

Insert the blinking LED code into main.c

Create L2CapSense.mk

Create a makefile called L2CapSense.mk

Put the build information into the L2CapSense.mk

Create a Make Target to run the project

Build and Test the Blinking LED

Create/Edit a File called CapSenseThread.c

Create/Edit a File Called CapSenseThread.h

Update main.c

Add a variable to hold the handle for the capSenseThread at the top of main.c

Update the main function to start the CapSenseThread

Update the L2CapsenseThread.mk

Build, Program and Test the CapSenseThread

 

 

Mouser PSoC 6-WiFi-BT L1 : Developer Resources

Designing low-power, cloud-connected IoT devices with PSoC® 6 MCU’s and WICED® Wi-Fi/Bluetooth

# Lesson
0 Introduction
1 Developer Resources
2 WICED Studio & CapSense
3 Using the CY8CKIT-028-TFT Shield
4 The Video Game
5 GoBle & Bluetooth
6 Integrate GoBle Bluetooth into the Game
7 Implement WiFi and AWS
8 Integrate WiFi and AWS Into the Game

Summary

This is an index of links to all of the PSoC 6 & CYW4343W learning resources.  You can click the links to go the website or see screen captures of the resources.

  1. PSoC 6 Product Page
  2. WiFi + Bluetooth Combo Product Page
  3. PSoC 6 Documentation
  4. PSoC 6 Community
  5. Wireless Combo Community
  6. CY8CKIT-062-BT-WiFi Development Kit Product Page
  7. CY8CKIT-062-BT-WiFi Development Kit Guide
  8. PSoC 6 Datasheet
  9. CYW4343W Datasheet
  10. PSoC 6 Technical Reference Manuals
  11. PSoC 6 Application Notes
  12. WiFi + Bluetooth Combo Application Notes
  13. PSoC 6 Code Examples
  14. Video Tutorials
  15. PSoC 6 Knowledge Base
  16. Peripheral Driver Library Documentation (Doxygen)
  17. WICED Documentation

PSoC 6 Product Page

You can find the PSoC 6 Product landing page for PSoC 6 here

WiFi + Bluetooth Combo Page

PSoC 6 Documentation

On the PSoC 6 Product Landing page there is a documentation tab that has links to all of the current documentation.

PSoC 6 Community

Cypress has an active development community and forum.  It can be found here.

Wireless WiFi + Bluetooth Combo Community

CY8CKIT-062-WiFi-BT Development Kit Web Page

Every Cypress development kit has a web page that contains all of the information about it, including links to the documentation and store.  The CY8CKIT-062-WiFi-BT kit page is here.

CY8CKIT-062-WiFi-BT Development Kit Guide

You can find the development kit guide here.

 

PSoC 6 Datasheet

The PSoC 6 Datasheet is available on Cypress.com here.

 

CYW4343W Datasheet

The CYW4343W datasheet can be found here.

PSoC 6 Technical Reference Manual

Each of the PSoC 6 devices has a lengthy discussion of the Technical Resources.  These documents can be found here

PSoC 6 Application Notes

You can get them all on our website… here is a link to the filtered list of PSoC 6 Application Notes.

The best application note is always the “Getting Started”.  In this case it is AN210781 “Getting Started with PSoC 6 MCU with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Connectivity”

WiFi + Bluetooth Combo Application Notes

Here is a link to all of the WiFI Bluetooth Combo Application Notes.

PSoC 6 Code Examples

You can find all of the PSoC 6 code examples on the web.  In addition they are built into PSoC Creator.

Or in PSoC Creator:

Videos

Cypress has made a bunch of videos that take you step by step through an introduction to PSoC 6.  You can find them on the Cypress training website.

PSoC 6 Knowledge Base

The Cypress technical support team writes “Knowledge Base” articles when there are repeated issues reported by customers.  You can find them here.

Peripheral Driver Library Documentation (Doxygen)

All of the APIs in the PDL are documented in a Doxygen generated HTML document.  You can get there from

  • Help -> Peripheral Driver Library (this link is live only when you have a PSoC 6 project open)
  • Right click on a component -> Open PDL Documentation

Particle Photon Configuration with Tinker Firmware

Summary

In the last article I wrote about using a CY3280 MBR3 Shield on a WICED WiFI 943907AEVAL1F development kit at the GE MegaHackathon.  In the next article I will show you the WICED HTTP firmware that I wrote to connect to the Particle Photon which they were using (I have written about Particle Photon before).  Obviously, I like Particle Photon because it is a WICED 43362 WiFi Radio.  In this article, I am going to show you how to get a Particle Photon going with the Tinker firmware.  Then test it with the iOS app, the web console and finally using CURL.  The CURL is just a mechanism to send HTTP Posts to the Tinker firmware, exactly what I will do in the next article on the WICED development kit.

Configure the Particle Photon

When you get a fresh Particle Photon out of the box you need to get it introduced to your WiFi network, and attached to your console.  To do this, start by going to setup.particle.io and following the process.

Particle Photon Configuration

 

Particle Photon Configuration

Particle Photon Configuration

Particle Photon Configuration

Particle Photon Configuration

Particle Photon Configuration

 

 

Particle Photon Configuration

 

 

Particle Photon Configuration

Testing with iPhone App

One you have “claimed” your Particle Photon and it is connected to the network, then you can talk to it with the Particle iOS app.  Here is what it looked like when I started the App on my phone.  You can see the device called “iotexpert-example” (remember that is what I named it from above).  The “Elkhorn_creek” Photon is the one that I wrote about in this article.

Particle Photon iOS App

Although the console says that I have the Tinker Firmware on the app, I wanted to make sure, so I use the iOS App to re-flash the Tinker Firmware.  You can do this by clicking the new device, then press the little “…” at the top right of the screen.  Finally click “Reflash Tinker”. It is awesome how fast that happens.

Particle Photon iOS Flash Firmware

Once I am sure about the version of the Tinker firmware, I test to make sure that things are working correctly.  First I click on “D7”

Particle Photon iOS Tinker App

Which brings up this screen where you can select digitalRead and digitalWrite.

Particle Photon iOS Tinker App

Then when you press the button it will switch from high to low and vice versa.

Particle Photon iOS Tinker App Particle Photon iOS Tinker App

You can also call the API directly by pressing “inspect” then “Data”

Particle Photon iOS digitalwrite Data Function

Particle Photon Console

In addition to using the iOS App, you can also interact with the Photon using the console.

Particle Photon Console

When I click on the “iotexpert-example” it brings up this screen where I can run the Tinker firmware functions.  In this case I ran “digitialwrite” with “D7,HIGH” which turns on the LED on the Photon.

Particle Photon Console

Testing the Particle Photon with CURL

The Particle Cloud exposes an API which lets you send Restful API requests to specific devices.  The Unix tool CURL lets me type command line requests (which I will mimic in the next Article using WICED).  The first command that I send is and HTTP GET which will return a JSON document that describes the configuration on my Photon.

You can see the device name etc in the JSON below.  It also shows that the Tinker firmware has four function built into it.

Then I can send a HTTP POST using Curl to turn on the D7 LED.

You can see the Blue LED right next to D7 turns on.

Particle Photon

Particle Photon Tinker App

I wondered where the Tinker App API was documented?  It turns out that the App is available in Particle library.  You can search by typing “tinker”

The section of code that matters is here.  The function takes a “String” and parses it.  It demands that the 2nd character be a PIN number between 0 and 7.  The first character be a capital “D”.  Then you need to have a “HIGH” (in caps) or a “LOW” (in caps)

In order to access the digitialwrite function via the network, they publish it (and some others).

When I first thought about the Tinker firmware I thought that it must be reasonably complex.  But it is not because it takes advantage of the Particle cloud functionality.  All in all what they did is very elegant and simple..

Now that it looks like my Particle Photon is working, in the next article I will show you WICED firmware to read the CapSense buttons and then Turn On/Off the LED on the Photon.

CY3280 MBR3 & WICED CYW943907

Summary

In the last Article I talked about the GE Megahackathon.  One of the groups at the event got interested in using a CY3280 MBR3 to send signals via a WICED CYW943907 to the Particle IO server which was connected to a Particle Photon.  I helped them with the implementation and thought that it would be useful to show here.

CYW3280 & WICED CYW943907

Cypress CY3280 MBR3

The CY3280 MBR development kit is a CapSense demonstration kit that shows the Mechanical Button Replacement 3 chip.  It features 4 CapSense buttons with LEDs, a proximity sensor, and a buzzer.  It is connected to another MCU via the Arduino pins. of the WICED CYW943907.  The device sits on the I2C bus and acts as an I2C Slave.  You configure it using EZ Click.

When you run EZ Click you can setup the configure the internal registers of the MBR3 to make the board act like a bunch of different things.  In this case I turned on

  • The MBR buttons 1-4 (you can see them in the picture above)
  • The Flanking Sensor rejection which makes it so that you can only press one button at a time.
  • All of the automatic tuning features.

EZ-Click CY3280

Once the main CapSense is configured, I moved to the other part of the configuration where I setup

  • The 4 LEDs to toggle and be full brightness when on
  • The buzzer to buzz for 100ms at 4kHz when something happens
  • The host interrupt pin as CS15/SH/HI.  This made the Arduino pin D2 be an interrupt when something happened so that WICED would poll the MBR3

EZ-Click CY3280

Once these settings were all done, I downloaded the firmware configuration via the KitProg USB connector.  Then I tested it using the bridge control panel which I have shown you a bunch of different times in the past.  The MBR3 acts as an I2C slave.  To find out what the state of the buttons are you need to read register 0xAA.  The only little trick is that the chip goes to sleep to save power.  In order to wake it up you need to send an I2C transaction, which ends up getting NAK’d.  But the next transaction you send will be ACKd.  In the screenshot below you can see that I tried two of the buttons (0x08 and 0x20)

Bridge Control Panel

One problem that I had is that the power system of this board is setup to take 5V from the Arduino base board but the WICED development kit gives only 3.3v.  Here is a picture of the power system from the MBR3 schematic.

CY3280 Power Supply

The MBR3 can run on 3.3Vs.  In fact it can run all the way down to 1.7v and up to 5.5v, but for some reason (which I can’t remember) we made the board only work with 5.0v.  To fix this problem I removed J12 and then wired a wire from the 3.3V Arduino pin.  The wire is soldered onto the 3.3v pin, but has a female connector on the other side so that it can be plugged into J12.  Here is a picture:

CY3280

The last thing that I needed to do was move the jumpers to position “A” which made the host interrupt pin be connected to D2, and move the I2C jumpers so that the MBR3 was connected to the Arduino instead of the P5LP kitprog.  You can see that in the J3_scl and J3_sda in the picture above.

WICED CYW943907

The CYW934907AEVAL1F is an development kit for the Cypress 43907 MCU+WiFi module.  The WICED CYW943907 board can do dual band (2.4 and 5Ghz), 802.11 a/b/g/n,  Ethernet and a whole bunch of other stuff.

WICED CYW943907

The first firmware that I wrote in WICED Studio:

  • Sets up an ISR to unlock a semaphore when the interrupt occurs
  • Initialized WICED_GPIO_9 to be an input and connected to an ISR … this is also known as Arduino D2
  • Setup the I2C Master Hardware in the 43907
  • Wait for a semaphore (from the ISR)
  • Read the I2C register 0xAA from the MBR

The only trick in the firmware is that I read the I2C with a “do” loop until I get a valid result, meaning that the MBR3 has woken up.

Once that is programmed I program and test the firmware.

Testing WICED CYW943907

In the next article I will modify all of this firmware and make the WICED CYW943907 send data via HTTP to the Cloud.

Leviton HomeKit D15S Light Switch – WICED WiFi

Summary

A couple of week ago I was in San Jose teaching a WICED WiFi programming class.  One of the bad-ass WICED Applications Engineers told me that Leviton was shipping a new Leviton HomeKit Light Switch that used WICED WiFi and Bluetooth called the Leviton DS15.  What was even cooler was the he had done a decent amount of the design with them.  So, I ordered a few of them from amazon.com to try out.  This started my normal spectacle of house-wiring that is a spiral of me shocking myself, bleeding, cussing and worst of all spilling my beer.  You would think that a guy with a degree from Georgia Tech and 25 years as a practicing engineer would know better… but props to those electricians out there as they have mad wiring skills.

The Panel

I know that it should be obvious.  Really, I do know.  But every time I start working on wiring in my house I think… “Oh I just have 1 or 2 things to do I don’t need to turn off the breaker.”  And literally every damn time, I shock the piss out of myself.  So, today I decided to turn over a new leaf and turn off the breaker.  What was interesting this time was I also decided to use my meter to make sure that the breaker was off… and today I discovered that the label on the panel in my barn is wrong.  Damn that electrician… I take back everything nice I said about electricians.  (That ugly handwriting is mine fixing the label)

electric panel

Installing the Leviton HomeKit Light Switch

I bought a bunch of the the Leviton HomeKit Decora switches from Amazon.com.  They are a normal looking paddle light switches, but they come with WiFi and Bluetooth and are compatible with Apple HomeKit.  This means you don’t need a special app on your phone to use them, and hopefully that means that the wife-factor is low enough.  (A hint for all you guys out there… if the lights don’t come on when your wife clicks them… you had better have a good couch).   Originally I had installed ZWave Light Switches in the barn as my son always leaves the stupid lights on, but I wanted to try a product that had chips in it that I work on.  Here we go:

Leviton HomeKit Light Switch

When you open the box you get the normal book worth of instructions, in 5 languages (or something).  You also get a cream colored faceplate.  The paper on the upper left of the picture shows the serial number that you scan in with the camera in the Leviton app to attach to your device to HomeKit.

Leviton HomeKit inside the box

Here is a zoom in on just the light switch.

Leviton HomeKit Light Switch

Here is a picture of the light switches in the box.  One of the things that I always struggle with is getting all of the wires to fit neatly in the box.  This box was originally done old school (only switching the hot)… which doesn’t work with these light switches.

Leviton HomeKit Light Switch Installed

Once you have the switches installed, you turn the breaker back on and run the Leviton App. The App will let you add the switch to HomeKit by scanning the numbers with your camera.

Leviton HomeKit Decora App

Once paired you can control them with the Leviton App.

Leviton HomeKit Decora App

Or with the HomeKit App.

Apple Homekit App

I did notice that there is now two generations of light switches 6 inches from where they were originally installed.   I suppose I should have cleaned that up.

Installation Aftermath

Finally… dont cry over spilled beer (actually do.. as it is a really good West 6th IPA)

West 6th IPA

 

Particle Photon: Elkhorn Creek Depth

Summary

In the previous article I showed you all of the components of the Particle Photon Ecosystem.  All that is cool.  But what can you build?  I have written extensively about the Elkhorn Creek in my backyard, and the system that I built to monitor the water level.  As part of that series of articles I explained that I have a 4-20ma current loop that turns pressure into water level read here .  In this article I will:

  • Attach the Photon to my Creek System Current Loop
  • Write the Firmware in the Particle Cloud IDE to publish W
  • Send events to the Particle Cloud & monitor
  • Use Webhooks to send the data to ThingSpeak.com

Attach Particle Photon to Creek System

To interface to a 4-20mA current look you just attach it to a 51.1 ohm resistor to serve as a trans-impedence amplifier.  Here is the PSoC Creator schematic for the board:  Using this schematic, the system will generate a voltage between (51.1 Ohms * 4ma = 204.4mV) and (51.1Ohm * 20mA = 1022 mV).   This voltage can then be attached to an Analog To Digital Convertor, then converted digitally into a Pressure, then a water depth.

I decided that the easiest thing to do with the Particle Photon was to attach the pin A0 to the highside input.  This was easy as I put a loop on the Creek Board.  The loop is labeled “PRES”.  The picture is a bit ugly as I was standing in the dark in the rafters of my barn.  Sorry.

Particle Photon attached to Elkhorn Creek Water Level 1.1

Particle Photon Firmware

When you look at the main loop of the firmware, lines 23-40 it does three things

  • Reads the ADC voltage on Pin A0
  • Applies an Infinite Impulse Response Filter (IIR) with coefficients of 7/8 and 1/8.  This is low pass filter.
  • Turns the voltage into depth.  This is done by turning (4-20ma) into (0-15 psi) then PSI into Feet

Then, on lines 34-39, I use the system time to figure out if it is time to publish again.  I publish every “INTERVAL”.

In order to test the Particle Cloud interface to the Photon, I setup all of the intermediate calculation of depth as “Particle.variable”s which allows me to inspect them remotely.

Sending Events to the Particle Cloud & Monitor

Once I flashed the firmware with the very cool Over-The-Air Bootloader, I go to the Particle Console and click on my device.  As soon as I do that I see the “Particle.variable”s that I defined in the firmware.  One by one I press “get” and after a second the data is displayed on the screen.  I am not exactly sure how the exactly works, but it is cool.

Particle Cloud Device Console

After inspecting the variables, I go the Logs page and look to see what the events are.  You can see that every 5 minutes (about) there is an event called “CreekDepth” with a -0.0 or so. That is good as it means that the Particle Photon is publishing regularly.  The answer is 0.0 (or about 0.0) as the Elkhorn Creek if not doing anything right now.  The other events are part of the web hook that I setup (and will talk about in the next section).

Particle Cloud Device Event Log

Using WebHooks to send data to ThingSpeak.com

Unless I am missing something, the Particle Cloud does not store your actual data.  They do have a mechanism to take Events from your devices and trigger a “WebHook”.  This is basically a RESTFul API call to another cloud.

Particle Cloud Webhooks

They call these “integrations” and you configure them on the Console.  When you press “Integrations” you end up with this screen which gives you the option of editing a current webhook or creating a new one.

Particle Cloud Integrations

When you click on “new integration” it gives you the option of connecting to Google, Microsoft Azure or Webhook.  I havent tried Google or Azure so for this article Ill stick with a Webhook.

Particle Cloud New Integration

I started with a WebHook to the ThingSpeak Cloud (because they show a nice example in the documentation).  ThingSpeak is run by the MathWorks people (same as Matlab).  They call ThingSpeak “an open IoT with Matlab Analytics”.  OK sounds cool.  In order to use it to collect and display data I start by creating a new account.  Then I click on the “New Channel” button to create an “Elkhorn Creek Depth” channel.  On this screen I say that there will be only one field “CreekDepth”.

ThingSpeak Create New Channel

In order to write data into this channel you need to have the API keys which give your Restful API call the authority to write into the database.  Press “API Keys” and you will see this screen.

ThingSpeak Channel API Keys

Now that I have an active channel (and I know the channel number and API write key) I go back to the Particle Cloud Integrations tab and create a Webhook.

Particle Cloud Edit Integration

Each time the “CreekDepth” event occurs, the Particle Cloud will do an API call to the ThingSpeak cloud and insert the new data.  On the ThingSpeak Cloud there is a chart of the data, and a handy-dandy way to insert the chart into your webpage.  Here it is for the Elkhorn Creek showing the last 6 hours of data which is flat at the time of this writing, but maybe when you read this page it will be raining in Kentucky and you will see something interesting.

I guess at this point I have a number of questions which I will leave to the future:

  • Exactly what is the form of the request made to the ThingSpeak cloud?
  • What is the mapping between the event –> API Request
  • What is the protocol for Particle.variables?
  • How does the Microsoft integration work?
  • How does the Google integration work?
  • How do I save power on the Photon?

I suppose Ill leave these questions to future posts.  If you have other questions leave them as I comment and Ill take a crack at trying to figure them out.

Embedded World 2017: PSoC Analog CoProcessor CapSense GUI

Summary

I have been building up pieces of code that are going to allow me to show the PSoC Analog CoProcessor –> WICED WiFi –> Amazon IoT –> WICED WiFi –> Secret New Chip –> Robot Arm.   In the previous two articles (part1, part2) I have shown you how to build most of the WICED firmware.  In this article I am going to focus on the PSoC Analog CoProcessor firmware (but if you look real close you can see the secret new chip’s development kit).

In the picture below you can see the red shield board.  This is a shield with the PSoC Analog CoProcessor plus a bunch of sensors that show the power of that chip.  The shield also includes 4x CapSense Buttons which I am going to use to set the position of the Robot Arm.  The PSoC will serve as a front end companion to the WICED WiFi Development Kit.  They will communicate via I2C with the PSoC acting as an I2C Slave and the WICED WiFi as a master.  Here is a picture of the all of parts minus Amazon.com’s cloud.

Embedded World 2017 Components

PSoC Analog CoProcessor

The PSoC Analog CoProcessor has the new Cypress CapSense block that gives you a bunch of new features, including enough measurement range to measure a capacitative humidity sensor (which you can see in the upper left hand part of the board).  For this demonstration I am just going to use the 4 CapSense buttons.  They will serve as the user interface for the Robot Arm.  The 4 buttons will set 4 different positions, 20%,40%,60%,80%.  I will be talking in much more detail about this shield in coming posts (later next month)

PSoC Analog CoProcessor Schematic

The PSoC Creator schematic is pretty straight forward.  I use the EZI2C slave to provide communication for the WICED board.  There are 4x LEDs that sit right next to the CapSense buttons,  and there are the 4x CapSense buttons.  The only slightly odd duck is the Bootloadable component which I use because when I designed the shield I did not put a programmer on it.  The BootLoadable allows me to me to load new firmware into the PSoC via the I2C interface.  Here is the PSoC Creator Schematic:

PSoC Creator Schematic

The CapSense configuration just specifies the use of 4x CapSense buttons that are automatically tuned by the Cypress magic.

CapSense Configuration

The last step in configuring the schematic is to assign all of the pins to the correct locations.

Pin Assignment

PSoC Analog CoProcessor Firmware

One of the great things about all of this process is how easy the firmware is to write.

  • Line 3 declares a buffer that will be used to relay the position information to the WICED board.  I start the position at 50%
  • Lines 8-9 start the EZI2C which starts up the EZI2C protocol and tells it to read from the “position” variable
  • Lines 10-11 gets the CapSense going

Inside of the infinite while(1) loop, I read from the CapSense and do the right thing

  • Lines 17-22 reads the CapSense status
  • Lines 24-27 set the correct position based on which buttons are pressed (notice that if no button is pressed then the position stays the same)
  • Line 29 turns on the Bootloader if B0 & B3 are pressed

PSoC Analog CoProcessor Main.c

Testing the PSoC Analog CoProcessor System

The easiest way to test the system is to use the Bridge Control Panel which comes as part of the PSoC Creator installation.  It lets me read the value from the EZ2IC buffer to make sure that the CapSense buttons are doing the right thing.  The command language is pretty simple.  You can see in the editor window that I typed “W42 0 R 42 X p;”  Everytime I press “enter” it sends the I2C commands:

  • Send an I2C start
  • write the 7-bit I2C address 0x42
  • write a 0
  • send a restart
  • read from address 0x42
  • read one byte
  • send a stop

You can see that I pressed each button and indeed got 20,40,60,80 (assuming you can convert hex to decimal… but trust me)

Bridge Control Panel

In the next article I will modify the WICED Publisher to poll the PSoC Analog CoProcessor and then publish the current state.

WICED WiFI

Last week I had the supreme privilege of hosting the WICED WiFI + Bluetooth + Zigbee software team at my office in Kentucky. This included the overall manager for WICED software (a truly remarkable guy), the engineering managers for WiFI and Bluetooth, the head of applications for WICED as well as a bunch of the firmware guys.  It occurred to me during the week that the people joining Cypress was the best part of the Broadcomm IOT acquisition.  And that is saying something as I really like the products.  Also at the summit were all of the software engineering leaders for PSoC (who I have worked with closely all of my career).  Needless to say, it was a bunch of badass developers.

The purpose of the meeting was to introduce the PSoC team to WICED and then talk about the future roadmap for those products.  Obviously I can’t talk to much about the 2nd part… well actually the only thing I can say is that it will be amazing as we will be able to offer PSoC with the power of WICED.

What I can talk about is the first part.  So, I thought that I would show you one of the things that we did with WICED.  First of all, WICED (Wireless Internet Connectivity for Embedded Devices) is the brand name that Cypress uses to describe all of the WiFi, Zigbee and Bluetooth chips and modules that were acquired from Broadcom/Avago.  The other thing we call WICED is the WICED SDK which is used to mean Eclipse plus all of the tools (programer, plugins etc) plus the software library that is used to build products using the WICED chips and modules.

In the world of programming the first example is always “hello world”.  In the world of MCUs the first example is always “blinking led”.  It turns out that the first example in WiFi is “scan” to show that you can see all of the WiFi networks around you.   The purpose of all of these examples is to prove that all of the tools can do their thing.

To start with they gave me this devkit, the BCM94343WWCD1_1  IMG_3049

The first thing to do is install WICED 3.7.  When you start WICED you will see a screen like this:

Screen Shot 2016-08-22 at 8.22.06 AM

For the purposes of the first design there are two important things to see on this screen.  First on the left side is the project explorer.  It has all of the guts of WICED.  As part of the installation we provide you a bunch of “apps”.  These apps range from simple examples (in the snip folder) to full fledged production quality applications (in the demo folder)

  • demo – full fledged applications
  • snip – short example projects
  • test – tools for debugging and testing wifi
  • waf – WICED Application Framework support (like an OTA Bootloader)
  • wwd – low level driver examples

Screen Shot 2016-08-22 at 8.27.04 AM

The example that I want to build is “scan”  specifically “scan.c”.  That can be found in the apps/snip/scan folder.  In this screenshot you can see that I opened “scan.c”

Screen Shot 2016-08-22 at 8.43.49 AM

The next thing that you need to do is build a “make target”.  The WICED team built a makefile that can seemingly do everything.  The makefile uses the name of the make target to setup all of the options required to do the make.  If you look on the right side of the screen you can see the currently existing targets:

Screen Shot 2016-08-22 at 8.24.40 AM

The easiest way to make a new target is to copy/paste a currently existing target.  Then you can right click on the new target and edit it to get things setup correctly.  The target name defines:

  • snip – the directory
  • scan – the subdirectory will the files (scan.c and scan.mk)
  • BCM94343WWCD1 – the name of the devkit (you can see it on the picture of the devkit)
  • download run – instructions to go ahead a boatload and start the app running

Screen Shot 2016-08-22 at 11.32.06 AM

Next, I plug in the devkit.  When it attachs, the devkit will enumerate as two USB devices

  • WICED USB JTAG Port
  • A serial port (in this case on COM12)

Screen Shot 2016-08-22 at 11.29.45 AM

After I plug in the kit I run Putty and attach to COM12 at 115200 baud

Screen Shot 2016-08-22 at 11.36.32 AM

And finally, double click the make target to build, download and run.  After it starts, the Putty screen fills up with all of the WiFI networks that are around me.

Screen Shot 2016-08-22 at 11.30.39 AM

All of that was pretty easy to get going.  Next lets see if I can actually do something.  Last week I showed the guys the Elkhorn Creek Water Level monitoring project and I told them that by the end of this week I would put one of their devkits into that system, so the next several posts will be about that process. (I hope)