Converging Threads

Friday May 27th.

The Nanode project is at last starting to gel, with a whole lot of separate threads coming together.

On Friday I met for lunch with Mike McRoberts to discuss the possibility of a commercial version of Nanode.

Later in the afternoon, I was joined at the London Hackspace by Andrew Lindsay, who is the leading light in maintaining and developing a library of routines to exercise the ENC28J60 - the particular Ethernet controller that we use on the Nanode.

Andrew demonstrated his latest code example of DHCP. This allows the Nanode to automatically be assigned an IP address which dramatically simplifies the connection to the router.

Andrew put together an example which involves an RGB LED being controlled by a dashboard app running on Pachube. The code was loaded onto the Nanode board and then it was plugged into the network router at the London Hackspace. Within a few seconds the Nanode had performed a DHCP request and had a IP address handed down to it. Andrrew loaded up his simple dashboard application with Pachube and soon he was controlling the colour of the RGB lamp completely remotely - see photo.

Andrews example is described in detail on his Blog here.

Whilst at the LHS we got talking with Martin Dittus, a regular member about how it would be really great to have a simple interpreted language running on the Nanode, so that users could set up their own scripts and modify how the Nanode is used for particular applications. The example I gave was similar to the old interpreted Basics, from the early home computers. Nanode has basically the same resources as those early computers - so why not a Basic like command shell.

Minutes later, Martin had a link to a project called bitlash, an interpreted language written specially for this sort of application and running on the standard Arduino. Bitlash takes about 14K of the Nanode program space, leaving about 16K for the ethernet and wireless functionality. Fortunately, bitlash is a true, serial command interpreter, and bitlash functions and scripts can be stored in EEprom or external memory, or provided across any serial link - which in Nanode's case would be a serial terminal window, or telnet running in a browser.

Bitlash has it's own API which allows the user's C program to interact with bitlash. After a few quick trial examples - I was reasonably convinced that bitlash running on Nanode would be almost ideal for our applications.

And so with two of the key elements of the Nanode project coming together we set of to "MiniBar" - a networking evening in Shoreditch.

Saturday May 28th

A bit of a foggy head after a lot of free Magners at MiniBar last night. Day spent loading Andrew's new EtherShield library into Arduino 0021 and looking at a version of Tiny Basic which runs in under 4K on the AVR.

Sunday May 28th.

The response for Nanode has been phenomenal and the batch of 100 initial version 5 boards have now been sold via the London Hackspace. A second batch of 25 has now been ordered to maintain a small stock.

Been looking more into Bitlash - this is a dream sent from heaven. It's exactly what the Nanode project needs to get commands and scripts over the web, wireless and other interfaces, via serial or telnet session. Here's what the Bitlash Wiki says:

The Bitlash embedded interpreter that runs in about 14k of memory on an Atmel AVR processor. It works nicely with Arduino to make a development and prototyping tool for those situations where you need to bang some bits on the Arduino but writing a sketch in C is premature. It's very convenient for bringing up and debugging new hardware.

The Bitlash command language is very similar to Arduino C and includes a large repertiore of the familiar Arduino C functions so you can hack your hardware from the serial command line or even over the internet via telnet.

You can store commands as functions in EEPROM and autostart them at bootup, making the automation and maintenance of small applications very easy.

A Bitlash enthusiast in the US is now storing and running bitlash scripts and functions from SD/MMC card. See here:

This language is so cool and opens so many doors for small products like Nanode. Time to stop blogging and get blashing!

Curious that an anagram of bitlash is HiBlast and so is Shit Lab - depending on how its going.