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control GPIO over USB



  • Hi there,

    absolute noob question here, but I'd like to control the GPIO through USB. I couldn't find straightforward documentation. Could someone point me to the right direction?

    Background

    (not immediately relevant for the question, though)

    • I'd like to use this library to talk with a coffee machine.

    I already managed to make this work, using fast-gpio and exposing this over REST. But now, I'd like to go one step further and try to talk directly with it.
    I work on OSX

    thanks!



  • Good question for simplifying it by not having to write all the logic on the board. I'd just use an arduino then. But if you wanted to you could write a python script to talk over serial USB. I'm trying to do USB from host to talk to an Arduino to control WS2812b LEDs. Seems tough.


  • administrators

    @cecemel Sounds like a cool project!

    I'm a little unclear about the overall setup of your project, so let me know if I misunderstood anything.

    Computer -> Omega
    You don't really need a library to talk to the Omega over USB, you can access the Omega via serial: https://wiki.onion.io/Tutorials/Connecting-to-Omega-via-Serial-Terminal
    If you don't want a serial terminal open, you can probably use the library you linked above to just send single commands (I've never tried it though).

    But you don't necessarily need a computer to send the Omega instructions. Which brings me to my next point...

    Omega -> Coffee Machine via USB
    The Omega can actually completely replace the need to use your computer since it has it's own USB host. As @Joseph-Sammarco mentioned, you can use Python to perform all of the serial communication

    To install Python and the required PySerial Library:

    opkg update
    opkg install python-light python-pyserial
    

    PySerial has a treasure trove of documentation: https://pythonhosted.org/pyserial/
    But I think you will most likely be interested in something along the lines of this first example.

    Let me know if this helps and how it goes!



  • Hi there,

    thanks for all the responses! It helped.
    At hindsight, controlling the GPIO over Serial interface was indeed quite trivial.

    Here's the script I made in Processing (unlikely whether this is going to help someone in the future, but anyway...): script

    The python library was equally helpful. There is a great SO example, which almost works out of the box, after correcting for baudrate and removing the parity, stopbits and bytesize parameters.


  • administrators

    @cecemel glad to hear you figured it all out. make sure to post photos or a video of the final result, we would love to see it!



  • Well, it's actually quite dull to look at. You know, click a button, coffee machine turns on (girlfriend was NOT impressed šŸ™‚
    However, since I am neither a CS nor an engineer and thus a complete electronics noob, I might make an howto on my github, for people like me, which kinda could make it useful.



  • @Joseph-Sammarco are you trying to do OMEGA -> USB -> ARDUINO? Cause I got that working with php and I added a wireless module on there for a wireless network of sensors.... I was thinking of writing a tutorial on how to accomplish this...if you need let me know. Cheers


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