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TCP Device Core / UDP Device Core

The TCP Device Core for Blue Pill, core-protocol-tcp, allows users to send and to some extend receive and process information of TCP to both ASCII and binary servers. Effectively, this can help to bridge communication with devices where a dedicated device core is not available.

The UDP Device Core for Blue Pill, core-protocol-udp, enables the exact same functionality as for TCP, just over a UDP connection.

This page describes how both device cores work, but using core-protocol-tcp as the example. The device cores have both a very basic mode and some more complex features that can come in handy in some cases. It has been designed to align with the corresponding TCP Client device core on the UniSketch platform.

Commands

The commands you can specify and send are ASCII by default and exactly what you see in the string will be sent as ASCII, unless:

  • \n and \r will send a newline or carriage return (bytes 10 and 13)
  • \xHH will send a byte with the value HH (in hex): so \xFF will send a byte with value “255”

  • \p1 or \p2 (alternatively \d1, \d2, \h1, \h2) will insert a parameter value as defined by the meta value p1 and p2 in the device core parameters Toggle, On Trigger and Off Trigger.
    The difference of using \p, \d and \h is whether the meta value is inserted as the byte value (\p), inserted as a decimal number like “255” or “37” or “3” (\d - there is no leading zeros) or in hexadecimal like FF or D0 or 00 (\h - in this case it’s always two characters and uppercase).

Example

Say you want to send a command to fire DMEMs on GVG100, in that case you want to send the text string “03 01 DB 00” to fire DMEM 01, send “03 01 DB 01” to fire DMEM 02 etc.
So setting up a command like “03 01 DB \h1” and then using the “p1” meta value through a constant in Reactor would allow you to distribute the same behavior across multiple hardware components on a panel but vary the Dmem value easily.

Testing and tools

An advice is to use the "ipserver"ipserver" binary tool provided by SKAARHOJ to set up a server to help testing the functionality until you are confident that everything works as expected and would function with the final target device.

Basic Configuration

The device core has some configuration fields:

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  • IP address and port for the server should be straight forward.
  • The Init Command is a command string that will be sent to the server one time upon a new connection.
  • The Ping Command will be send periodically. The period between its being sent will be 3000 ms in this case.
  • The Test Command is send when the Test trigger is activated (that's typically available as a button in Reactor)

Cowboy Style

The most straight forward way to use the device core would be to send one-shot triggers cowboystyle. This requires the minimum of configuration but provides the least amount of long term convenience. This is probably a good place to get started.

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Command Configuration

The device core allows you to configure a number of fixed commands. The advantage is that you can bundle an A and B command into a single action for toggles etc. Also, this is the way you can use meta values with the \p1,\p2, ... placeholders etc. Finally, it's actually possible to decode some level of status back from the returned content of the device via a regular expressing.

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  • The Label field will be set as a fixed value in the device core so you can import it as a label in Reactor
  • The Command A and B are available to easily create toggle functionality
  • The Matching Return Value field contains a regular expression. You can study the format of regular expressions elsewhere, but they are basically very powerful and advanced string matching patterns. Whenever the device core receives feedback from the server it will run all regular expressions set up over each line and whenever there is a match, it will take the value in parenthesis and store as the status value in the corresponding Status parameter in the device core.

The commands configured here will be available through these parameters in the device core:

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  • Toggle, Off Trigger and On Trigger allows various ways of using the command, either by a one-shot type action or by a standard toggle action that keeps internal state in the controller (without any confirmed feedback).
  • Label is the text label from configuration. You may want to use this to set a nice title in the displays
  • Status is the match value from the last time the regular expression matched the return content. Used carefully, this can provide some feedback from a remote system.


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