Sending to Dashbox with ESP wifi device

[vilord]

good day!
i have a basic model GEM with just the 2 serial interfaces, and a dashbox. unfortunately the location of the GEM is not in any way convenient to where there is ethernet for the dashbox.
ben you mentioned that I could use one of the basic wifi serial interface boards to get data into the dashbox... do you have any pointers for someone who's done that, or what i'd want to run on the interface board? most of the ones i am used to open up a socket interface where the dashbox would have to connect *to* the board, but it seems that the dashbox is expecting me to have the board set up to somehow send the serial data to an http endpoint?

thanks for any help/direction you can provide!

jesse

[ben]

good day!
i have a basic model GEM with just the 2 serial interfaces, and a dashbox. unfortunately the location of the GEM is not in any way convenient to where there is ethernet for the dashbox.
ben you mentioned that I could use one of the basic wifi serial interface boards to get data into the dashbox... do you have any pointers for someone who's done that, or what i'd want to run on the interface board? most of the ones i am used to open up a socket interface where the dashbox would have to connect *to* the board, but it seems that the dashbox is expecting me to have the board set up to somehow send the serial data to an http endpoint?

thanks for any help/direction you can provide!

jesse

EDIT: Just read the title. ESP is a bit harder. Maybe a sketch like this will work: https://github.com/NaoNaoMe/ESP8266-WiF ... rentBridge

The GEM has RS232 exposed (Tx, Rx, GND) on the green headers located below the LEDs. Any RS232-to-WiFi board will work. You'll likely need to cut a serial cable to connect.

Settings on the GEM:

Packet Send - HTTP Get
Data Post - Click the DashBox button, enter http://dashbox-ip/ as URL

Settings on WiFi module:

TCP Client sending to DashBox at Port 80.

[vilord]

Getting back to this one.

What does a "packet" look like on the serial line when a serial port is set to HTTP Get?

Does the GEM try to get an IP address over the serial port or something?

Do you have the code for the etherport device somewhere that I could take a gander at, or is it something proprietary? If email is better, I am on gmail, address is hikeit.

If I can get this working with my GEM that's currently direct-attached to the dashbox then I'll pick up another GEM for the garage panel. Trying to keep costs down, as my partner says 'but the vue is like half the price!' to which I say 'but the data isn't as accessible, the graphs aren't as good'...

[ben]

Getting back to this one.

What does a "packet" look like on the serial line when a serial port is set to HTTP Get?

Does the GEM try to get an IP address over the serial port or something?

Do you have the code for the etherport device somewhere that I could take a gander at, or is it something proprietary? If email is better, I am on gmail, address is hikeit.

If I can get this working with my GEM that's currently direct-attached to the dashbox then I'll pick up another GEM for the garage panel. Trying to keep costs down, as my partner says 'but the vue is like half the price!' to which I say 'but the data isn't as accessible, the graphs aren't as good'...

We have developer manuals at the bottom here:

http://brultech.com/software/files/getsoft/1/1

Packet formats specifically:

http://brultech.com/software/files/down ... at_2_1.pdf

The DashBox can forward the binary packets to any other server via Packet Forwarding. You mentioned Python, there's a couple libraries to digest that data:

https://github.com/jkeljo/greeneye-monitor
https://github.com/matthewwall/mtools

(btmon has a couple forks that implement more features, I've recently done a Python3 conversion for example https://github.com/BenK22/mtools/tree/influxdb/bin).

Yeah, the Vue is insanely cheap, to the point where I wonder if they're taking a loss to eventually push pay-per-use features.

EDIT: Also the GEM has 2 COM ports, both accessible from the RS232 header. You can configure COM port #2 to send somewhere different with a different packet format (COM2 is restricted to fixed-length packets however) and hook whatever up to its Tx, Rx, GND. You could even tap into the GEMs 5V if you need to also to power whatever device on the lower headers (+5V/GND).