cmdporter

Some old and new devices can be controlled by various means other than wifi (serial port, ethernet, bluetooth...). It'd be cool if we could control these devices from over a wifi network.

So we came with the idea of using a nanocomputer like the raspberry pi as a wifi "intercom" to send commands to these devices.

The use case we worked on was to attempt to power on a videoprojector over wifi by connecting a raspberry to its serial port. The idea was also to have the raspberry connect to a local wireless lan. A nearby user connected to the same WLAN could then access a web page served by the raspberry and be offered a choice of control commands to execute.

The first evening wasn't very productive : we noticed we had forgotten to bring in some parts for our equipment and Fred spent quite some time to get the raspberry up an running and connecting properly to a WLAN with wpa_supplicant. We planned to use the goserial package to send control bytes to our test projector. Gaël struggled to get a working driver for our serial usb adapter on MacOS Yosemite and got no success. But eventually we were happy to hear some beeping sounds at about 4:30am when the videoprojector turned off after we had sent it the right control sequence from Linux Mint.

With a few extra hours we think we could have had the full workflow working properly. It was fun and exciting to try to get this original projet up and running. Fred for sure will want to contine working on it in the future.

This golang hackathon was also a good occasion to test drive our go programming skills. Thierry who joined us to discover go from scratch seems to have enjoyed the language and looks like he wants to dig more into it in the future.

To be continued :)

Built With

• css3
• go
• golang
• goserial
• html5
• raspberry-pi