The lower panel(s)
Run
This is literally where the action happens. Esparto is designed so that commands can come from several sources:
- MQTT topics
- the web UI
- from within the app itself using the "invoke" functio
The first is one of the most common forms of communications between IOT "things" in home automation. You obviously need access to an MQTT "broker" (fancy name for "server", really) either your own or public one. At this very moment, there is no way to enter a username and password - except manually in your own code - so until I get that fixed... your own broker is the best bet. I use mosquitto (which can be found Mosquitto.org download page) on a raspberry Pi.
But don't despair if none of those options are available, you can still do a lot with Esparto through its own UI, or from your own code. Want to change GPIO0 (D3)'s debounce value for example? Either call Esparto.invoke("cmd/pin/cfg/0/15"); or come to this screen, select the cfg option form the dropdown menu, add the /0 to the Topic line and type 15 into the payload field. Then hit "Simulate MQTT" - Esparto's internals that actually "do the business" are called with exactly the same message as they would have received from a genuine MQTT server. Simples.
As commands are received and actioned (from any source) the stats are dynamically updated. Soon - and certainly before release - I shall add "Alexa" as a source because Esparto is fully Alexa-compatible by pretending to be a Belkin WeMo when asked in the right way. All it can do is "turn on "<your device> or "turn off" the same. That's as much as a lot of devices do, anyway.
The "all" source is special one built in to Esparto allowing you to send a single command to all Esparto device on your 'net, as well as addressing each one indvidually by its device name. For example - while not necessarily advised - "all/cmd/reboot" will do exactly what you think it would.
Users can to subscribe to any topic they choose - including # wildcards - when called back in onMQTTConnect (see previous post in the series for a simple example).
In the demo, the user has subscribed to a wildcard topic like so:
Esparto.subscribe("wild/#",[](vector<string> vs){
string suit=vs.front();
Serial.printf("Wilcard handler suit is , card is %s\n",(CSTR(suit)),CSTR(vs.back()));
if(suit=="hearts" || suit=="clubs" || suit=="diamonds" || suit=="spades"){
Serial.printf("You chose the %s of %s\n",CSTR(vs.back()),CSTR(suit));
}
else Serial.printf("Invalid suit %s\n",CSTR(suit));
},"cards");
(They also included (not shown) a simpler topic "flash" which they wrote to call the same code as Alexa commands call. So when Alexa is told to "turn on testbed" it has the same effect as MQTT command "testbed/flash/1" for on and ...0 for off. )
He/she has chosen to only allow this wildcard topic from another made-up source "cards" so "testbed/wild/party" won't work, but" cards/wild/animal "will.
And therein lies a slight oddity - and a caution. Esparto cannot predict the billions of permutations that come after ...wild/ - only the user can decide that. Hence for the system to work Esparto not only has to accept anything of that form, it also has to add it to the above table and count it and that has consequences.
The user code in the demo rejects any subtopic except (rather suitably) hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades and would like the payload to be a card from 2 to 10 or J K Q A. Lazily, it doesn't actually validate the payload, but then all it does is parrot ack to you what you send it, so no harm done in this contrived case. In the real world such appalling coding (I should know, I wrote it - deliberately to bring out these points of course) will almost certainly lead to a crash if unexpected, unvalidated input and/or gibberish is fed to any wildcard topic - so be careful. Trust no-one, and validate everything to within an inch of its short life.
Another consequence is that the more wild rubbish you send that Esparto is duty-bound to accept, the longer that list will get, the slower the UI will become until finally Esparto's self-protection mechanisms will cut in and reject everything from all sources until some memory is freed somehow. This will certainly cause erratic behaviour and possible meltdown at the nuclear power plant, so don't do it. If no memory can get freed, then your Esparto app will die a slow lingering death till you want to reboot it. When you do, remember it's your fault, not Esparto's.
While this a shorter section than some others, this pane is probably one of the most useful of Esparto's many features. There is neither the space nor the time to go into detail about each of the commands and new ones are being thought of as I type...
You may find that all the ...dump... options are missing from the final release, as they are 90% used in debugging. It will be done in such a way that even average programmers will be able to hack into the code and just turn on a #define and recompile. They do steal heap though, whic is already in short supply so don't say you haven't been warned. On the other hand if I can trim some fat from elsewhere during my final code tidy, I might leave some/all of them in. Invoke("cmd/watch/this/space"), you might say.
Others are just fun to play with: .../pin/flash/... , .../pin/pwm/... and .../pin/pattern for example/...
Download the release when it's out "soon", edit in your own SSID/password/device name and give all the topics/commands a try - it's what Esparto is for. Or wait 3 minutes for it to give up and go into AP mode then configure it with your phone.
And enjoy it!
- MQTT topics
- the web UI
- from within the app itself using the "invoke" functio
But don't despair if none of those options are available, you can still do a lot with Esparto through its own UI, or from your own code. Want to change GPIO0 (D3)'s debounce value for example? Either call Esparto.invoke("cmd/pin/cfg/0/15"); or come to this screen, select the cfg option form the dropdown menu, add the /0 to the Topic line and type 15 into the payload field. Then hit "Simulate MQTT" - Esparto's internals that actually "do the business" are called with exactly the same message as they would have received from a genuine MQTT server. Simples.
As commands are received and actioned (from any source) the stats are dynamically updated. Soon - and certainly before release - I shall add "Alexa" as a source because Esparto is fully Alexa-compatible by pretending to be a Belkin WeMo when asked in the right way. All it can do is "turn on "<your device> or "turn off" the same. That's as much as a lot of devices do, anyway.
The "all" source is special one built in to Esparto allowing you to send a single command to all Esparto device on your 'net, as well as addressing each one indvidually by its device name. For example - while not necessarily advised - "all/cmd/reboot" will do exactly what you think it would.
Users can to subscribe to any topic they choose - including # wildcards - when called back in onMQTTConnect (see previous post in the series for a simple example).
In the demo, the user has subscribed to a wildcard topic like so:
Esparto.subscribe("wild/#",[](vector<string> vs){ string suit=vs.front(); Serial.printf("Wilcard handler suit is , card is %s\n",(CSTR(suit)),CSTR(vs.back())); if(suit=="hearts" || suit=="clubs" || suit=="diamonds" || suit=="spades"){ Serial.printf("You chose the %s of %s\n",CSTR(vs.back()),CSTR(suit)); } else Serial.printf("Invalid suit %s\n",CSTR(suit)); },"cards");(They also included (not shown) a simpler topic "flash" which they wrote to call the same code as Alexa commands call. So when Alexa is told to "turn on testbed" it has the same effect as MQTT command "testbed/flash/1" for on and ...0 for off. )
He/she has chosen to only allow this wildcard topic from another made-up source "cards" so "testbed/wild/party" won't work, but" cards/wild/animal "will.
And therein lies a slight oddity - and a caution. Esparto cannot predict the billions of permutations that come after ...wild/ - only the user can decide that. Hence for the system to work Esparto not only has to accept anything of that form, it also has to add it to the above table and count it and that has consequences.
The user code in the demo rejects any subtopic except (rather suitably) hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades and would like the payload to be a card from 2 to 10 or J K Q A. Lazily, it doesn't actually validate the payload, but then all it does is parrot ack to you what you send it, so no harm done in this contrived case. In the real world such appalling coding (I should know, I wrote it - deliberately to bring out these points of course) will almost certainly lead to a crash if unexpected, unvalidated input and/or gibberish is fed to any wildcard topic - so be careful. Trust no-one, and validate everything to within an inch of its short life.
Another consequence is that the more wild rubbish you send that Esparto is duty-bound to accept, the longer that list will get, the slower the UI will become until finally Esparto's self-protection mechanisms will cut in and reject everything from all sources until some memory is freed somehow. This will certainly cause erratic behaviour and possible meltdown at the nuclear power plant, so don't do it. If no memory can get freed, then your Esparto app will die a slow lingering death till you want to reboot it. When you do, remember it's your fault, not Esparto's.
While this a shorter section than some others, this pane is probably one of the most useful of Esparto's many features. There is neither the space nor the time to go into detail about each of the commands and new ones are being thought of as I type...
You may find that all the ...dump... options are missing from the final release, as they are 90% used in debugging. It will be done in such a way that even average programmers will be able to hack into the code and just turn on a #define and recompile. They do steal heap though, whic is already in short supply so don't say you haven't been warned. On the other hand if I can trim some fat from elsewhere during my final code tidy, I might leave some/all of them in. Invoke("cmd/watch/this/space"), you might say.
Others are just fun to play with: .../pin/flash/... , .../pin/pwm/... and .../pin/pattern for example/...
Download the release when it's out "soon", edit in your own SSID/password/device name and give all the topics/commands a try - it's what Esparto is for. Or wait 3 minutes for it to give up and go into AP mode then configure it with your phone.
And enjoy it!
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