MCU Devices

Microcontroller (MCU) devices can be connected to Simple IoT systems via various serial transports (RS232, RS485, CAN, and USB Serial). The Arduino platform is one example of a MCU platform that is easy to use and program. Simple IoT provides a serial interface module that can be used to interface with these systems. The combination of a laptop or a Raspberry PI makes a useful lab device for monitoring analog and digital signals. Data can be logged to InfluxDB and viewed in the InfluxDB Web UI or Grafana. This concept can be scaled into products where you might have a Linux MPU handling data/connectivity and a MCU doing real-time control.

See the Serial reference documentation for more technical details on this client.

mcu

File Download

Files (or larger chunks of data) can be downloaded to the MCU by adding a File node to the serial node. Any child File node will then show up as a download option.

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Debug Levels

You can set the following debug levels to log information.

  • 0: no debug information
  • 1: log ASCII strings (must be COBS wrapped) (typically used for debugging code on the MCU)
  • 4: log points received or sent to the MCU
  • 8: log cobs decoded data (must be COBS wrapped)
  • 9: log raw serial data received (pre-COBS)

Zephyr Examples

The zephyr-siot repository contains examples of MCU firmware that can interface with Simple IoT over serial, USB, and Network connections. This is a work in progress and is not complete.

Arduino Examples (no longer maintained)

Several Arduino examples are available that can be used to demonstrate this functionality.