Lorawan/TTN with the TTGO ESP32 board

So I’m testing my TTGO Lora32 board with the RIOT-OS operating system to connect to the The Things Network, and while at first I had some success, then out of the blue things didn’t worked anymore.

The code that I’m using is based on the standard RIOT-Os Loramac example but with supporting code for ABP instead of the OTA activation.

The code is available at this Github repository.

Since I saw no activity on any channel for the Lora transmission by using the RTLSDR dongle, I suspected that something was up.
The Arduino based code from for connecting to TTN using Lorawan worked fine, and so it excluded an issue with the hardware.

By going to RIOT-OS installation directory, under drivers and on the sx127x directory, I’ve enabled on th sx127x.c file the debug to 1, since enabling debug on the semtech_loramac.c file held no useful information:

#define ENABLE_DEBUG (1)

With debug enabled, lo and behold, at startup:

2019-01-22 14:11:02,993 - INFO # [sx127x] error: failed to initialize SPI_0 device (code -1)
2019-01-22 14:11:02,993 - INFO # [sx127x] error: failed to initialize SPI

This is rather strange since at the initial tests the sx127x was detected and worked.
The only thing that changed is that I periodically update the RIOT local repository, and checking my board definition with other ESP32 boards that have a sx127x transceiver, the way that the pins where declared were quite different from what I had initially.

So I’ve changed the way that the pins for the SPI and the sx127x peripheral where defined, and the result:

2019-01-22 14:28:00,847 - INFO #  -> Node activation by: ABP
2019-01-22 14:28:00,847 - INFO # [sx127x] SPI_0 initialized with success
2019-01-22 14:28:00,848 - INFO # Set ABP information.

And the data arrives at TTN without any issue:

So either I had initially had the pins for SPI and the sx127x defined wrong or the latest RIOT build changed the way pins where defined.

A more complete example, working with multiple threads, is also available at this Github repository.

The ESP32 TTGO board using RIOT-OS

In the last few months, RIOT-OS operating system gained support for the ESP32 and ESP8266 based boards. RIOT-OS also supports several communication protocols, namely Lorawan through the usage of the Semtech implementation.

My post connecting the ESP32 TTGO board to TTN (The Things Network) describes (more or less) how to connect this board to the The Things Network using the Arduino and LMIC stack for the ESP32.

So why don’t give it a go with RIOT-OS?

Board definition:
RIOT-OS works with board definitions that describes several key features of the targeting board. In the case of the TTGO ESP32 Version 1 that I have several things needed to be changed from the base ESP32 board definitions that are available now on the RIOT-OS code base.

The most important issue was the clock speed definition for this ESP32 board, since it seems it uses a 26MHz clock instead of the standard(?) 40Mhz clock. Without the change for the clock speed all the serial output on the USB port was garbled and unreadable.

With the clock speed correctly set, important information regarding the pins for the I2C, SPI buses and the sx1276 chip needed to be defined. That was also correctly defined, and preliminary tests show that the Oled and sx1276 is detected using the Semtech Loramac stack.

I haven’t yet change the other pin definitions, so for the basic I2C, SPI, Button, and sx1276 are correctly defined.

The board definition can be found in my repository located at RIOT TTGO ESP32 repository under the directory boards.

To use this board definition, we just need to copy the board definition directory to the boards directory of the cloned RIOT-OS repository.

Testing:
For testing we can just compile the examples under the example directory for the RIOT TTGO ESP32 repository.

There are two examples: One for testing the OLED screen and other to test the sx1276 and the Semtech Loramac stack.
This last example is based on the provided RIOT-OS example for Lorawan, but I’ve added support for ABP and debug prints to see what is going on.
On the Make file, we should select the type of activation and fill out the required data from the TTN device console. All data just needs to be copied and pasted directly and it should work.

To build the examples I’m using Docker according to this instructions.

Additionally, for the ESP32 flashing to work, the ESP-IDF repository must be cloned and its location set for RIOT build by setting the ESP32_SDK_DIR variable.

Results:
The following things work fine:

– The serial console works fine.
– The blue led, on and off
– The button, detecting it release and pressed.

The OLED works fine through I2C, but the I2C speed must be set exactly as defined on the board definition, otherwise it won’t work. It took me several hours to debug this issue.

The sx1276 works, it is detected and the Semtech stack seems to be able to use it. Adding some debugging to Loramac stack shows that the DIO# interrupts are detected but there are issues. For example I have two boards and with the same code I have different behaviours which seems rather strange… I was able to send data to the TTN gateway, but when waiting for the Semtech stack it hangs waiting for a stack status message. The other board is always complaining regarding MAC timeout.

So, all in all, as a first experience with RIOT-OS on the TTGO board, excepting the Lorawan stack, everything seems to work as expected. Regarding the Lorawan stack, probably going to try the LMIC Arduino implementation to see if it is possible to port it to RIOT-OS.

Docker container web interface – Portainer and Riot-OS Development

This post is a follow up of starting up with RIOT-OS. To be able to develop with RIOT-OS an easy (and easier) way to do so is just to install docker and web UI docker interface Portainer to control docker.

So we will install Docker, Portainer, and finally the RIOT-OS building environment.

Installing Docker and Portainer, is an initial stepping stone for using the dockerized development environment for RIOT-OS, since I don’t want to install all the development environments in my machine.

Installing Docker:
On Arch-Linux is as simple as installing the Docker package using pacman, enabling the services and rebooting.
Basically we need to run, as root the following commands:

pacman -S docker
systemctl enable docker.service
reboot

After rebooting the following command should return some information

docker info

A sample output is:

Containers: 2
 Running: 0
 Paused: 0
 Stopped: 2
Images: 9
Server Version: 18.09.0-ce
Storage Driver: overlay2
 Backing Filesystem: extfs
 Supports d_type: true
 Native Overlay Diff: false
Logging Driver: json-file
Cgroup Driver: cgroupfs
Plugins:
 Volume: local
 Network: bridge host macvlan null overlay
 Log: awslogs fluentd gcplogs gelf journald json-file local logentries splunk syslog
...
...
...

Installing Portainer
Installing the Docker Portainer Web UI is as simple as:

docker pull portainer/portainer

To run Portainer a set of complete instructions on this page, but basically on the simplest way is:

$ docker volume create portainer_data
$ docker run -d -p 9000:9000 --name portainer --restart always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer

We can now check if the docker image is up:

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                 COMMAND             CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                    NAMES
7a38ae7fc922        portainer/portainer   "/portainer"        4 seconds ago       Up 3 seconds        0.0.0.0:9000->9000/tcp   portainer

Since I have already ran the Portainer container, the initial setting up steps when accessing the URL HTTP://localhost:9000 do not appear, but we need to choose:

1. A set of credentials to use as de administrator for portainer
2. The local machine registry to connect to the local docker containers.

1- At initial access we define an user and password:

2- Then we connect to our local docker instance:

Press Connect and then we can now access our Docker instance from Portainer:

Pressing the Local Docker Connection we can now manage our docker resources.

Installing the build environment for RIOT-OS
We can do it by two ways:

From the command line:

docker pull riot/riotbuild

or use Portainer:

This container is very big, so we need to wait some time for the container image download. The command line shows in greater detail the download process.

After the image is downloaded, we can follow these instructions for building our apps using the docker container as the build environment.

After the image is installed:

To use is is as simple as going the the examples directory and do:

make BUILD_IN_DOCKER=1

From this we are now able to build based RIOT-OS applications for several targets, including the ESP8266/ESP32.

As we can see we even don’t need to have a running container, just the image.

A simple start with the RiotOS operating system for IoT devices

The RiotOS operating system is an Open Source operating system that targets different embedded platforms while allowing to use the same code base for some aspects of IoT development: Connectivity, protocols and security. It also supports other key aspects such as threads, Inter process communication, synchronization support on the kernel side. It also supports several communications protocols, suche BLE, 6LoWPAN, Lorawan, and so on.

At the target level for the RiotOS operating system, RiotOS supports a wide scope of different platforms, including a special native platform. What does this means? It means that within certain limitations, it is entirely possible to develop an IoT application that runs where the code is developed, this includes our PC and any SBC such as the RaspberryPI. This support opens a new window of opportunities where it is possible to integrate different classes of devices, such as Arduino, STM32 and RPI while leveraging the knowledge on the same supporting code base.

How to start:

This is a very quick start instructions for building a native demo application with network support. As usual all the instructions apply to a Linux Operating system, in my case Arch Linux.

Clone the RiotOS repository:

Just run:

cd /opt
git clone https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT.git

I’ve chosen the /opt directory for the sake of example.

Compile one the example application:

All example applications are under the example applications.
In each directory, there is a Makefile file with a specific content.

For example on the examples/default there is Makefile that targets the native environment.

Of key interest is the line in this file that defines the target board:

BOARD ?= native

If the BOARD variable is not defined on the running environment it will use the native board.

We just need now to run the make command:

[pcortex@pcortex:default|master]$ make
Building application "default" for "native" with MCU "native".

"make" -C /opt/RIOT/boards/native
"make" -C /opt/RIOT/boards/native/drivers
"make" -C /opt/RIOT/core
"make" -C /opt/RIOT/cpu/native
...
...
...
"make" -C /opt/RIOT/sys/shell
"make" -C /opt/RIOT/sys/shell/commands
   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
  88189    1104   72088  161381   27665 /opt/RIOT/examples/default/bin/native/default.elf

We can see that the compilation output was placed at /opt/RIOT/examples/default/bin/native/default.elf.

But if we ran the default.elf executable, we get:

[pcortex@pcortex:default|master]$ bin/native/default.elf 
usage: bin/native/default.elf  [-i ] [-d] [-e|-E] [-o] [-c ]
 help: bin/native/default.elf -h

Options:
    -h, --help
        print this help message
    -i , --id=
        specify instance id (set by config module)
    -s , --seed=
        specify srandom(3) seed (/dev/random is used instead of random(3) if
        the option is omitted)
    -d, --daemonize
        daemonize native instance
    -e, --stderr-pipe
        redirect stderr to file
    -E, --stderr-noredirect
        do not redirect stderr (i.e. leave sterr unchanged despite
        daemon/socket io)
    -o, --stdout-pipe
        redirect stdout to file (/tmp/riot.stdout.PID) when not attached
        to socket
    -c , --uart-tty=
        specify TTY device for UART. This argument can be used multiple
        times (up to UART_NUMOF)

A little side note, under bin there is a native directory but if we target the compilation to a different platform, a new directory under bin will be created to that platform.

Returning to result to the above command, we notice that the command requires a TAP (terminal interface point) interface. The fact is that the RiotOS code to access the network resources of the hosting operating system doesn’t access the network interface directly, but does it through the TAP interface. We can create only one TAP interface, or several TAP interfaces, which in such case, means that we can have several RiotOS applications using an TAP based network to communicate between themselves and also with the external network. Neat!

RiotOS offers a script to the TAP intefaces, but before running the script, just make sure if any Linux operating system Kernel was done recently, a reboot migh be needed to the interfaces be successfully created.

So:
[pcortex@pcortex:RIOT|master]$ ip a

1: lo:  mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: enp6s0:  mtu 4000 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:24:8c:02:dd:7e brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.1.68/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global noprefixroute enp6s0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::224:8cff:fe02:dd7e/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

Now we run the tapsetup script that creates the TAP interfaces. This script when called without any parameters, it creates two TAP interfaces. If we pass the -c argument with a number, for example -c 4, it will create 4 TAP interfaces. The -d parameter deletes all interface that where created.

[pcortex@pcortex:tapsetup|master]$ pwd
/opt/RIOT/dist/tools/tapsetup                
[pcortex@pcortex:tapsetup|master]$ sudo ./tapsetup 
creating tapbr0
creating tap0
creating tap1
[pcortex@pcortex:tapsetup|master]$ ip a
1: lo:  mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: enp6s0:  mtu 4000 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:24:8c:02:dd:7e brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.1.68/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global noprefixroute enp6s0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::224:8cff:fe02:dd7e/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
8: tapbr0:  mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 2e:bd:d8:88:64:55 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet6 fe80::2cbd:d8ff:fe88:6455/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
9: tap0:  mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel master tapbr0 state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 9a:a0:bc:fa:c7:61 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
10: tap1:  mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel master tapbr0 state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 2e:bd:d8:88:64:55 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

We can see that both tap0 and tap1 where created and are down.

Within two different windows we can run the default.elf with each interface now:

Window one: > sudo ./default.elf tap0
Window two: > sudo ./default.elf tap1

The two instances will start communicate and the tap interface have addresses and are up now.

11: tapbr0:  mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 0e:db:a6:77:3b:e5 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet6 fe80::cdb:a6ff:fe77:3be5/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
12: tap0:  mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel master tapbr0 state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 0e:db:a6:77:3b:e5 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet6 fe80::cdb:a6ff:fe77:3be5/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
13: tap1:  mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel master tapbr0 state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether be:65:4f:4d:a0:ed brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet6 fe80::bc65:4fff:fe4d:a0ed/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

Conclusion:
The above is a simple example, but RiotOS offers several examples including COAP, MQTT-SN and OpenThread examples.

The next step is to test RiotOS on ESP8266 and ESP32.