Additional Channel inputs

[benkot]

I am working on a project which receives a serial input of weather station status packets. This is of course using the reactive comms as the serial interface reading a timed output status packet every 5 seconds.

The project to receive the data is basically straight forward from the reactive comm perspective. What I would like to do though is to take my input data and relay it out to be used by the same driver as in input from say a dropbox file or a network connection. So the if the driver is connected to actual sensor by serial I then want to relay the data out so the same driver can share the status packet to other instances where those drivers would use either a network file like dropbox file as the channel input or a network connection as a channel input and basically receive the data the similar to the data from the sensor.

For the file, I envision at first using a network shared drive but later came to realize a dropbox file would make it easier to share for those outside of the immediate network.. Say a cluster of observatories could use the one weather sensor.

For the network connection, I had origianally been thinking of using the broadcast address where I would broadcast the data from the sensor in the same manner as soon as it was received from the serial port. So I would then just create a network channel and all the processor/transaction activity would remain unchanged in the secondary instances of the driver. However I then thought maybe this would be additional uncessary traffic on all network IP's using the broadcast address. Maybe what should happen is the host instance with the serial device would setup a UDP transponder which would wait for a request on a given port and only respond to secondary instances. So then secondary instances would have their input set as a UDP channel which would then send a command to the host instance and wait for the response. Hence only the channel connection again would change and the command string of the transaction would change.

Any idea as to configuring the channel for a host file channel input and a UDP network file as the input source to the Reactive Comms link.

Any if it should be UDP or a more robust TCP/IP channel?

Todd

[NameOfTheDragon]

I'm not completely certain that reactive comms is the right solution for that. It sounds like you need some sort of distributed message bus, which is really a higher level concept than low-level device communications. You could certainly do it by dropping files into DropBox or OneDrive but I don't know how reliable that would be. I tend to shy away from using file I/O for inter-process communication.

You might be interested to see the weather software that I've been working on, there might be scope for a collaboration. It's not open source right now but if you were prepared be party to a nondisclosure agreement, then I can give you access to the project if you would like to consider a collaboration. My project has a plugin architecture and there are two different types of plugin:

• Data source plugins
• Data logger plugins

Currently, there is a plugin for the "SkyNet" hardware that I'm developing and another that pulls data from the DarkSky API (the data service used by clearoutside.com). I've found this data source to be remarkably effective. The software provides interfaces for ASCOM Weather Safety, and ACP Weather. I was looking at making a pair of data relay plugins, which sounds a lot like what you are trying to do. It would need a transmitter (data logger) plugin and a receiver (data source) plugin. Let me know if this is of interest to you.