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EspruinoHub

A BLE -> MQTT bridge for Raspberry Pi and other Embedded devices for Espruino and Puck.js

Setting up

Ideally use a Raspberry Pi 3 or Zero W, as these have Bluetooth LE on them already. However the BLE USB dongles mentioned in the Puck.js Quick Start guide should work.

Get Raspbian running on your Raspberry Pi

  • Download Raspbian Lite from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
  • Copy it to an SD card with sudo dd if=2017-11-29-raspbian-stretch-lite.img of=/dev/sdc status=progress bs=1M on Linux (or see the instructions on the Raspbian download page above for your platform)
  • Unplug and re-plug the SD card and add a file called ssh to the boot drive - this will enable SSH access to the Pi
  • If you're using WiFi rather than Ethernet, see this post on setting up WiFi via the SD card
  • Now put the SD card in the Pi, apply power, and wait a minute
  • ssh pi@raspberrypi.local (or use PuTTY on Windows) and use the password raspberry
  • Run sudo raspi-config and set the Pi up as you want (eg. hostname, password)

Installation of everything (EspruinoHub, Node-RED, Web IDE)

These instructions install up to date Node.js and Node-RED - however it can take a while! If you just want EspruinoHub and the IDE, see the next item.

# Install a modern version of nodejs and nodered
sudo apt-get install build-essential python-rpi.gpio
bash <(curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/node-red/raspbian-deb-package/master/resources/update-nodejs-and-nodered)
# Get dependencies
sudo apt-get install mosquitto mosquitto-clients bluetooth bluez libbluetooth-dev libudev-dev
# Auto start Node-RED
sudo systemctl enable nodered.service
# Start nodered manually this one time (this creates ~/.node-red)
sudo systemctl start nodered.service
# Install the Node-RED UI
cd ~/.node-red && npm install node-red-contrib-ui
# Now get EspruinoHub
cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/espruino/EspruinoHub
# Install EspruinoHub's required Node libraries
cd EspruinoHub
npm install
# Optional: Install the Espruino Web IDE to allow the IDE to be used from the server
git clone https://github.com/espruino/EspruinoWebIDE
(cd EspruinoWebIDE && git clone https://github.com/espruino/EspruinoTools)
# Give Node.js access to Bluetooth
sudo setcap cap_net_raw+eip $(eval readlink -f `which node`)

You can now type ./start.sh to run EspruinoHub, but it's worth checking out the Auto Start section to see how to get it to run at boot.

Installation of EspruinoHub and Web IDE

# Install Node, Bluetooth, etc
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git-core nodejs nodejs-legacy npm build-essential mosquitto mosquitto-clients bluetooth bluez libbluetooth-dev libudev-dev
# Now get EspruinoHub
git clone https://github.com/espruino/EspruinoHub
# Install EspruinoHub's required Node libraries
cd EspruinoHub
npm install
# Optional: Install the Espruino Web IDE to allow the IDE to be used from the server
git clone https://github.com/espruino/EspruinoWebIDE
(cd EspruinoWebIDE && git clone https://github.com/espruino/EspruinoTools)
# Give Node.js access to Bluetooth
sudo setcap cap_net_raw+eip $(eval readlink -f `which node`)

You can now type ./start.sh to run EspruinoHub, but it's worth checking out the Auto Start section to see how to get it to run at boot.

Auto Start

There are a 2 main ways to run EspruinoHub on the Raspberry Pi.

Headless Startup

This is the normal way of running services - to configure them as a system start-up job using systemd:**

    sudo cp systemd-EspruinoHub.service /etc/systemd/system/EspruinoHub.service

and edit it as necessary to match your installation directory and user configuration. Then, to start it for testing:

    sudo systemctl start EspruinoHub.service && sudo journalctl -f -u EspruinoHub

If it works, Ctrl-C to break out and enable it to start on login:

    sudo systemctl enable EspruinoHub.service

Console Startup

If you have a video output on your Pi then you can run EspruinoHub at boot - on the main display - so that you can see what it's reporting.

  • Edit .bashrc and add the following right at the bottom:
if [ $(tty) == /dev/tty1 ]; then
  while true; do
    EspruinoHub/start.sh
    sleep 1s
  done
fi

  • Now run sudo raspi-config, choose Boot Options, Desktop / CLI, and Console Autologin

  • Next time you reboot, the console will automatically run EspruinoHub

Notes

  • On non-Raspberry Pi devices, Mosquitto (the MQTT server) may default to not allowing anonymous (un-authenticated) connections to MQTT. To fix this edit /etc/mosquitto/conf.d/local.conf and set allow_anonymous to true.
  • By default the HTTP server in EspruinoHub is enabled, however it can be disabled by setting http_port to 0 in config.json
  • The HTTP Proxy service is disabled by default and needs some configuration - see HTTP Proxy below

Usage

Once started, you then have a few options...

Status / Websocket MQTT / Espruino Web IDE

By default EspruinoHub starts a web server at http://localhost:1888 that serves the contents of the www folder. You can disable this by setting http_port to 0 in config.json.

With that server, you can:

  • See the Intro page
  • See the status and log messages at http://localhost:1888/status
  • Access the Espruino Web IDE at http://localhost:1888/ide if you install the espruino-web-ide NPM package (see the 'Setting up' instructions above). You can then connect to any Bluetooth LE device within range of EspruinoHub.
  • View real-time MQTT data via WebSockets at http://localhost:1888/mqtt.html
  • View any of your own pages that are written into the www folder. For instance you could use TinyDash with the code from www/mqtt.html to display the latest BLE data that you have received.

Node-RED / MQTT

You can access Node-RED using http://localhost:1880

Once you add UI elements and click Deploy they'll be visible at http://localhost:1880/ui

The easiest way to get data is to add an MQTT listener node that requests /ble/advertise/# (# is a wildcard). This will output all information received via advertising.

Useful MQTT advertising parts are:

  • /ble/presence/DEVICE - 1 or 0 depending on whether device has been seen or not
  • /ble/advertise/DEVICE - JSON for device's broadcast name, rssi and manufacturer-specific data
  • /ble/advertise/DEVICE/manufacturer/COMPANY - Manufacturer-specific data (without leading company code)
  • /ble/advertise/DEVICE/rssi - Device signal strength
  • /ble/advertise/DEVICE/SERVICE - Raw service data (as JSON)
  • /ble/advertise/DEVICE/PRETTY or /ble/PRETTY/DEVICE - Decoded service data. temp is the obvious one

To decode the hex-encoded manufacturer-specific data, try:

var data = Buffer.from(msg.payload.manufacturerData, 'hex');

You can also connect to a device:

  • /ble/write/DEVICE/SERVICE/CHARACTERISTIC connects and writes to the charactertistic
  • /ble/read/DEVICE/SERVICE/CHARACTERISTIC connects and reads from the charactertistic
  • /ble/notify/DEVICE/SERVICE/CHARACTERISTIC connects and starts notifications on the characteristic, which send data back on /ble/data/DEVICE/SERVICE/CHARACTERISTIC
  • /ble/ping/DEVICE connects, or maintains a connection to the device, and sends /ble/pong/DEVICE on success

After connecting, EspruinoHub will stay connected for a few seconds unless there is any activity (eg a write or ping). So you can for instance evaluate something on a Puck.js BLE UART connection with:

=> /ble/notify/c7:f9:36:dd:b0:ca/nus/nus_rx
"\x10E.getTemperature()\n" => /ble/write/c7:f9:36:dd:b0:ca/nus/nus_tx

/ble/data/c7:f9:36:dd:b0:ca/nus/nus_rx => "23\r\n"

MQTT Command-line

These commands use the Mosquitto command-line tools:

# listen to all, verbose
mosquitto_sub -h localhost -t /# -v

# Test publish
mosquitto_pub -h localhost -t test/topic -m "Hello world"

You can use the commands in the section above to make things happen from the command-line.

HTTP Proxy

EspruinoHub implements the Bluetooth HTTP Proxy service

The HTTP Proxy is disabled by default as it can give any Bluetooth LE device in range access to your network. To fix this, edit the http_proxy and http_whitelist entries in config.json to enable the proxy and whitelist devices based on address (which you can find from EspruinoHub's status of MQTT advertising packets).

To allow Bluetooth to advertise services (for the HTTP proxy) you also need:

# Stop the bluetooth service
sudo service bluetooth stop
# Start Bluetooth but without bluetoothd
sudo hciconfig hci0 up

See https://github.com/sandeepmistry/bleno

Troubleshooting

When using the HTTP Proxy I get BLOCKED returned in the HTTP body

Your BLE device isn't in the whitelist in config.json - because the HTTP Proxy exposes your internet connection to the world, only BLE devices with the addresses you have specified beforehand are allowed to connect.

TODO

  • Handle over-size reads and writes for HTTP Proxy