Cayenne Competition

Cayenne

We mentioned Cayenne in an earlier post when we were looking for a video web serving solution for the Raspberry Pi. They provide a drag and drop dashboard for your IoT projects.

They have announced a home automation contest so we thought we would give it a try. The judging criteria for the contest is:

• Interaction of Arduino hardware and Cayenne software with various areas of the home
• Use of Cayenne’s Triggers & Alerts and Scheduling features
• Number of devices and sensors connected
• Real world practicality and usability

You have to use Cayenne obviously and need to include at least one Arduino.

Connecting an Arduino to the Cayenne Server

This is pretty well documented for the Arduino and Raspberry Pi but there were a few missing steps in getting the connection script to run on our Mac. There are 3 things you need to configure:

1. Connect your Arduino to your PC. Open up your Arduino IDE, download the Cayenne Library.
2. Set up your free Cayenne account. Start a new project and add an Arduino. Copy the sketch for your device and paste it into the IDE. Upload the sketch and run it.
3. This was the tricky bit for us. You need to run a connection script on your Mac which redirects the Arduino traffic to the Cayenne server. The scripts are located under the extras\scripts folder in the main Arduino library folder. The instruction for Linux and OSX is to run: ./cayenne-ser.sh (may need to run with sudo).

Getting the Connection Script to work on a Mac

First you need to find the script. We got to ours using:

cd Arduino/libraries/Cayenne/extras/scripts

As instructed, we then tried:

./cayenne-ser.sh

But received the error:

-bash: ./cayenne-ser.sh: Permission denied

No problem we thought, we will just use sudo

sudo ./cayenne-ser.sh

Received a new error

sudo: ./cayenne-ser.sh: command not found

That's weird. So we tried:

sudo sh ./cayenne-ser.sh

And received another error, but we were getting closer...

This script uses socat utility, but could not find it.

  Try installing it using: brew install socat

So we gave that a shot but we didn't have Homebrew installed. Homebrew is a package manager for the Mac (similar to apt-get on Raspbian). To install Homebrew:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Once Homebrew is installed you can use brew to install socat. Socat is a command line based utility that establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data between them. This is used to get information from the Arduino to the Cayenne server.

brew install socat

Once you have done all that, you can run your connection script again. The script ran but didn't use the correct port. You can direct which port to use with the following flag:

sudo sh cayenne-ser.sh -c /dev/tty.usbmodem1421

Use the port listed in the Arduino IDE under Tools -> Port.

Cayenne Hello World

To test your new dashboard connection to the Arduino, the easiest way is to add a switch widget pointed at digital output 13 (D13). On most UNO variants this is also connected to an LED so toggling that pin will toggle the LED. If you don't have an onboard LED then you can always connect an external LED. Don't forget to use a current limiting resistor if you do.

The beauty of this is that you don't even have to add any code to the Arduino sketch, you can just use the connection sketch provided when you start a new project. For completeness we will include the code below, this is for a USB connection. Don't forget to insert the token for your project.

#include <CayenneSerial.h>

// Cayenne authentication token. This should be obtained from the Cayenne Dashboard.
char token[] = "YOUR_TOKEN_HERE";

void setup()
{
  //Baud rate can be specified by calling Cayenne.begin(token, 9600);
  Cayenne.begin(token);
}

void loop()
{
  Cayenne.run();
}

The setup for your button should look like this:

So apart from a bit of messing about to get the connection script to run, it all works as advertised. We might have a crack at the home automation competition if we can think of something original to do...