Anybody working on SNMP functionality for the Spinneret?

Christopher Erickson

Newbie here with a general question.

I would love to be able to sprinkle Spinnerets around a commercial/industrial environment, doing various sensing and electromechanical control tasks and communicating back to a centralized SNMP management console that would log data, issue automated commands and send out automated alarm messages via email & SMS.

Is anyone out there working on anything like this?

I have tried forum searches, RTFM and GIYF but have come up dry so far.

Thanks for reading.

Mike G

I'm not sure if anyone implemented an SNMP application layer on the Spinneret. SNMP would be an awesomely cool project and a very good fit for the Spinneret. I'm willing to lend a hand, time permitting.

Christopher Erickson

I'm a SPIN virgin myself so it would be a long walk for me. I have experience with BASIC, PBASIC, MSBASIC, QBASIC, ZBASIC.net, VisualBASIC, FORTH, (some) C, FORTRAN and RPN. I was hoping that someone already had a module for SNMP in SPIN!

mindrobots

Christopher,

First off, Welcome!

Secondly.....did you say Forth?? There is PropForth (see link below) which runs on the Prop and has vocabularies written to turn the Spinner into a HTTP server or an IP server supporting up to 4 concurrent Telnet sessions PLUS a commend line interface across the Spinner's serial interface. I would think these could provide a good start for SNMP functionality.

I'm relatively new but strangley drawn to Forth and especially PropForth on all the Propeller platforms I can find. It runs well on the Spinner and is fun to play with on any!!

Christopher Erickson

It's been a while since I did anything serious with FORTH (or RPN) but I always loved working with stacks and numerical operands. Ironically, FORTH was created for controlling telescopes and observatories and that is exactly what I am working on right now, on the summits of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa here on the Big Island of Hawaii. Hardly anybody here is using SNMP remote management for anything besides routers and Ethernet switches and it just seems like a perfect fit to come up with a tiny SNMP-managed microcontroller widget that could be sprinkled around an observatory, monitoring and controlling fans, vents, motors, seismic sensors, weather sensors, current sensors, temperature sensors and a whole lot more. Professional astronomers love to measure things, collect volumes of data and create pretty graphs, LOL. If I can come up with a great little economical SNMP-managed microcontroller solution that was highly scalable (in both tasks and numbers) and could be painlessly aggregated into a smart central management station, I believe there would be a lot of industrial, commercial and scientific applications for it.

Give it PoE (Power over Ethernet) and it becomes even easier to deploy.

Opto-isolation, serial bridge, AtoD and a couple of solid-state relays would be great too!

Sort of like a modern PLC on steroids.

mindrobots

Christopher,

This is all good stuff and things I want to do with my Spinners. Being time limited and easily distractable, it's still on my list.

I haven't tried PoE with my Spinners yet but it's now possible in my "lab" with a transformer and the adapter cables, so it's on the list.

I'd seriously check out the Spinner with your favorite programming language (there are actually many to choose from) or Spin and start playing with the remote IP sensing capabilities. Past experience tells me that your efforts will get farther than mine, faster!

The Spinner is currently I/O Pin limited once you get everything up and running to support the IP and basic life support. In the PropForth environment, there is pretty solid support to connect Props in a Master/Slave/subslave configuration and direct Forth words to particular COGs on particular Props monitoring a group of pins. It's a pretty cool hierarchy of COGs and I/O's once you get it set up.

As time & energy permits, I'd like to collaborate with you on this as our contribution to the Internet of Things.

Christopher Erickson

I was sort of hoping that we wouldn't have to start from scratch. Like you, I have a lot of irons in the fire and without some modules to start from, this just might be way too big of a project to complete. Especially when I can get a "Linux gumstick" computer with SNMP, Web and a whole bunch more already operational for not much more money than the Spinneret. The only thing they lack is low level I/O control without adding some complex external components via USB.

Paul

As a matter of fact...

My favorite links:
http://www.rane.com/note161.html <- actual bits and bytes!

The source that everyone seems to use:
http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/

SNMP background info:
http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_TCPIPNetworkManagementFrameworkandProtocolsSNMPand.htm

Paul

Christopher Erickson

Thanks for the links!

Reading will now commence...

Paul

Christopher Erickson wrote: »

I can get a "Linux gumstick" computer with SNMP, Web and a whole bunch more

Citation please? Are you talking about the Verdex pro?

Paul

Christopher Erickson

Paul wrote: »

Citation please? Are you talking about the Verdex pro?

Paul

http://www.gumstix.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumstix

http://johnwoconnor.blogspot.com/2009/03/linux-on-gumstick-tour-of-gumstix-overo.html

http://gumstix.org/

Paul

Thanks for the links. Over on NET-SNMP.org there is a program called MIB2C that creates the SNMP agent. That may be a good starting point. That's assuming we want to make the Spinneret into an agent.

Christopher Erickson

Well, it looks like the NetBurner products already support SNMP and PoE so that will probably be the direction I go for now.

Sometimes it seems like the support for the Propeller microcontrollers and applications like the Spinneret is pretty-thin.

David Carrier

Now that the contest has ended, we will be working on an official Spinneret Web Server firmware to meet the goals that we had established at http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?119478. We can impliment SNMP too, if there is enough demand. We will also be working on a second generation of the hardware, using the new W5200 Ethernet controller.

We are not likely to include PoE (Power over Ethernet) as the parts and assembly costs would increase by about 25%, which would significantly increase the retail price for everyone, including those not using PoE. NetBurner recommends using modules from Silver Telecom, (http://www.silvertel.com/poe_products.htm) which look like a very cost effective method of adding PoE for just the users that desire it. We could add connections to facilitate users who wish to add PoE.

— David Carrier
Parallax Inc.

Christopher Erickson

That's excellent news!

I sure hope NTP client/server and SNMP are included...

So many cool, highly-scalable, distributed automation and robotic applications are possible when SNMP is directly supported with fully-configurable MIB's.

Not to mention maybe a tiny 6-pin header plug so an optional PoE power supply could be mounted above or below the main board. PoE would make multi-Spinneret distributed control applications SO much easier to deploy and manage.