Thingy external connection

RE: Thingy external connection

endnode — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 16:33:18 GMT

Your believe in "general enough" FW plug which will allow any team or dev to plug whatever and do what they sketched on the whiteboard during last brainstorming is nice, unfortunately I've never seen this working in real;) And Homekit or mesh networking won't help you, they actually make the picture and solutions even harder. Right now you have Thingy as great HW platform with the (al)most powerful BLE SoC on the market so write a minimal FW with well designed OTA (and/or wired) bootloader which will allow you to extend the things in the future if you need and you can go. And that part is kind of inevitable, if you give bootloading architecture into hands of anyone else then you cannot cry later if it's not generic or secure enough for your purpose. Every serious platform/device manufacturer solves this on his own, this is the most core thing in this business you can get. My view.

RE: Thingy external connection

Sheldon — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 16:21:52 GMT

Guess I am naive as well. FW, security, should be from hardware vendor, as is BLE mesh stacks, HomeKit support etc. Performance is split between vendor and custom developer both equally responsible. Performance directly affects power, assuming constant hardware, so they are linked. Just having a difficult time seeing the point of a SOC device that cannot be customized without taking the entire FW in-house and building a custom version. Handful of lines of code to read sensors, or I2C values, and send commands would solve a lot of use cases. Mesh networks should not require a hub to perform useful work, and in order to do useful work, does the device not need to be able to perform some custom work? Sigh. Right now I have a Thingy that requires an iOS device (or Android), to do anything, so a great sensor node, but what else can it do?

RE: Thingy external connection

endnode — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 15:47:48 GMT

Call me naive but this approach will never get you security, performance and power consumption wise where I would like to see any production embedded device.

RE: Thingy external connection

Sheldon — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:48:13 GMT

Indeed we could look at others, however, the Thingy:52 has such great promise. A nice package, full of sensors, easy to implement, OTA FW updates, however, without being able to add custom code we cannot build upon it. As BLE mesh networks come available, we would like to have sensor networks that communicate with each other, and have the ability to work without an App. Right now we would need to build the FW, and keep it synced with Nordic to add custom code.

RE: Thingy external connection

Sheldon — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:43:49 GMT

Adafruit Feather nRF52 Bluefruit LE - nRF52832. In reality, what we would like is to be able to install a module, with or without the Arduino portions. We are capable of coding the drivers and programs needed, just the entire FW is not needed. Further, it would be best for security and future upgrades if the FW were managed by Nordic, and included the latest Bluetooth Mesh when available. Then, a custom module could be written and added to the device for the FW to execute. And the existing OTA FW updating could be utilized when FW updates were available. At current, the Thingy:52 is really only useful for the existing functionality, which is fine, we would just like to have been able to add functionality. As an extra example, how would we utilize the BLE mesh and have a program monitor the Pressure and send a message to another BLE mesh device (Thingy:52) to flash the LED as a warning?

RE: Thingy external connection

endnode — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:37:13 GMT

All right, if Arduino sketches are something what can solve your problem then it's definitely not worth looking for anything else;)

RE: Thingy external connection

endnode — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:34:12 GMT

Well it sounds like nice idea, but can you throw example of any such platform which offers this attachment of external components without need to change the FW (I mean really offers attaching some reasonable range of I2C and SPI sensors not only 2 examples tested by the vendor)?

RE: Thingy external connection

Sheldon — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:17:57 GMT

Adafruit Feather nRF52 Bluefruit LE - nRF52832 has what I was hoping the Thingy:52 had, an Arduino wrapper to write simple sketches to be uploaded and executed.

RE: Thingy external connection

Sheldon — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:11:29 GMT

Thank you for the assistance. While building the FW is possible, although painful, and I'm sure I could figure out the procedure, it is simply not worthwhile for my purposes. Other platforms are much easier to utilize simple I2C commands to specific addresses, and permits adding simple Sketches to be run. Updating the FW to make changes is not as efficient nor convenient. My goal for the Thingy was to not need to work with FW (as stated in the marketing documents). I still think small wrapper code for common I2C and GPIO commands could be added so BLE could be used via the iOS app to perform generic read/write commands. Then, sensors and other devices could be experimented with via simple changes to the App. No worries, I'll use a different device.

RE: Thingy external connection

run_ar — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 11:54:04 GMT

@grrowl (sheldon) The thingy fw can be downloaded here or here. Consider looking at the Documentation to understand the sw architecture. Maybe you can get away with modifying some existing drivers.

RE: Thingy external connection

endnode — Tue, 22 Aug 2017 15:50:46 GMT

As there is basically infinite number of possible interfaces (on both HW and SW level) it's almost impossible to develop magic plug which will be able to communicate with any sensor. So yes, you will need to develop your own FW to work with such sensor.