RF12Registry Upgrade & Installation

The RF12Registry update to HouseMon was included (merged) into the ‘develop’ branch on 2013-07-07. The pull request for this upgrade can be found here. Note that this pull request is currently at time of writing inside the ‘develop’ branch, so after you ‘clone’ the housemon repo you should switch to the ‘develop’ branch or merge the changes into your own work.

This upgrade installs the following Briqs:

RF12Registry

This briq relies upon the rf12registrymanager to supply all its services. rf12registrymanager is also installed into the briqs folder, but it will not appear itself as an available briq.

RF12Demo-ReadWrite

This is a functional replacement for the RF12Demo-serial briq. Its does all the same original stuff, listening for incomming packets etc, but also has some extras to allow it to be communicated with from the outside world.

RF12Input

This briq provides a number of input mechanisms that you can harness. It also provides a simple web page GUI that you can use immediately once you have configured your system.

Suggested updates:

A patch was recently submitted to jeelib for a small upgrade to the rf12demo sketch. It adds another ‘command’ to the existing rf12demo commands. Specifically it adds a command to obtain the ‘version’ string of the sketch. From this we can more easily determine the sketches capability. i.e rf12demo.10 can do more than rf12demo.9 when it comes to sending out commands. Details of the update are here. This patch did not increment the rfdemo version number displayed on sketch startup.

You can tell if you have this feature by sending the character ‘v’ to your jeenode connected serial port. If the sketch replies with [RF12Demo.10] you have the feature. If your script replies with the configuration/help screen, you do not have the feature and an upgrade is suggested.

Note:If you cannot upgrade, you may still be able to make use of the RF12Registry using earlier versions of RF12Demo but this requires additional steps. Additionally you can also still make use of the RF12Registry if your connected node does not use [RF12Demo.xx] at all, but again this will require additional steps.
(You can check here for this information)

Once you have updated your HouseMon installation and confirmed you have the latest RF12Demo.10 sketch flashed onto your Jeelink, you can proceed to install the relevant components.

Technically the installation order is not that important, and until HouseMon gets a dependancy loader we cannot really confirm the order the briqs get loaded the next time HouseMon starts, but the order below is considered the most logical.

1. From your updated HouseMon Admin screen, load the new RF12Registry Briq. There is nothing additional to configure in this initial version of the RF12Registry Briq.

2. Now go ahead and load the RF12Input Briq from the Admin panel. There is nothing additional to configure so we can go straight to the ‘Install’ button. One of the things RF12Input does is register itself with the socket 3334 (the next one along from the default HouseMon install of 3333). If you have anything competing for this port you may want to correct it. (by the time you read this there may well be an upgrade to allow it to be changed without editing code, but until I get the chance to apply a patch to make this a configuration parameter, you can edit the source if you find a conflict). Finally RF12Input installs a new Web page in the HouseMon menu bar, called ‘RF12Input’.

3. Unload any existing RF12demo-serial briq’s or other Briq’s bound the the serial port of the Jeelink you want to work with (ttyAMA0 in this example). You can mix and match rf12demo-readwrite and rf12demo-serial (on different serialports of course) as they coexist in the same installation, however to take advantage of write capability you can install two or more instances of rf12demo-readwrite.

4. For RF12Demo-readwrite installation and its additional configuration parameters please look here

5. Once you have installed and configured your rf12demo-readwrite briq, you should continue with the example installation