pi-blaster-mqtt

This Raspberry Pi (RPi) service subscribes to an MQTT broker running on the RPi and processes commands to set GPIO pins to PWM values. It's based on the excellent pi-blaster software that uses a local device file approach for control. Like pi-blaster, this software provides PWM control with low CPU impact on the RPi.

How to install

Install Prerequisites

You need to have an MQTT broker installed on the RPi:

sudo apt install -y mosquitto

Build and install directly from source

The build environment is based on Autotools to allow for compilation on the Raspberry Pi, or cross-compilation.

You may need to install autoconf to build. On Raspbian and other Debian based systems this can be achieved with:

sudo apt-get install autoconf

You will need to install the MQTT libraries:

sudo apt-get install -y libmosquitto-dev libmosquitto1-dbg mosquitto-clients mosquitto-dev mosquitto

Building is extremely simple:

./autogen.sh
./configure
make

To start pi-blaster-mqtt and have it relaunched automatically on every reboot:

sudo make install

Or to start pi-blaster manually run:

sudo ./pi-blaster-mqtt

And to uninstall, simply run:

sudo make uninstall

This will stop pi-blaster-mqtt and prevent it from starting automatically on the next reboot.

Build your own deb package and install with dpkg

The Debian package relies on systemd which means you must have Raspbian 8 or later (aka "Jessie"). Run cat /etc/debian_version) to check what version you are currently running.

Install the debian tools required to compile and prepare the package:

sudo apt-get install debhelper dh-autoreconf dh-systemd dpkg-dev \
  init-system-helpers autoconf

And build the package:

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -i && sudo dpkg -i ../pi-blaster*.deb

Install with docker

If you have docker on your RPi, you can run this image

docker run -it --privileged --rm -v /dev:/dev sarfata/pi-blaster-mqtt

Or build from source in git repo

docker build -t pib .

docker run -it --privileged --rm -v /dev:/dev pib

How to use

GPIO Pin Numbers

You must use the GPIO number (BCM xx in the diagram below).

Controlling One Pin at a Time

From the RPi or from a host on the same network, you can use the Mosquitto CLI to test:

mosquitto_pub -h <host> -t pi-blaster-mqtt/text -m "<pin>=<value>"

For example, from the RPi, to set pin 4 to a typically neutral value (150ms, or 0.15 seconds) use this command:

mosquitto_pub -h localhost -t pi-blaster-mqtt/text -m "4=0.15"

Likewise to set pin 4 to a typically max value (200ms, or 0.20 seconds) use this command:

mosquitto_pub -h localhost -t pi-blaster-mqtt/text -m "4=0.20"

Controlling Multiple Pins at a Time

From the RPi or from a host on the same network, you can use the Mosquitto CLI to test:

mosquitto_pub -h <host> -t pi-blaster-mqtt/line -m "<pin>=<value>|<pin>=<value>|<pin>=<value>"

For example, from the RPi, to set pin 4 to a typically neutral value (150ms, or 0.15 seconds) use this command:

mosquitto_pub -h localhost -t pi-blaster-mqtt/line -m "4=0.15|17=0.15|27=0.15"

How to adjust the frequency and the resolution of the PWM

On startup, pi-blaster-mqtt gives you the frequency of the PWM, the number of steps that you can control, the maximum and the minimum period of a pulse.

sudo ./pi-blaster-mqtt
Using hardware:               PWM
Number of channels:           8
PWM frequency:                100 Hz
PWM steps:                    1000
Maximum period (100  %):      10000us
Minimum period (0.100%):      10us

You can adjust those by changing a few defines at the top of the source code:

• NUM_SAMPLES: The number of steps
• SAMPLE_US: The time of one step (minimum period)

If you do not need a resolution of 1000 steps (approximately equivalent to a 10 bit DAC), then you can reduce the number of samples or increase the duration of the steps.

Richard Hirst who wrote the original code recommended not going below 2us for SAMPLE_US.

Options

To override the default list of supported GPIO pins and specify fewer (or more) you can specify a comma separated list of GPIO numbers. This is also the default list:

--gpio 4,17,18,27,21,22,23,24,25

To use the BCM2835's PCM peripheral instead of its PWM peripheral to time the DMA transfers, pass the option:

--pcm

This is useful if you are already using the chip's PWM peripheral, for example for audio output.

To invert the pulse (off = pin HIGH, pulse = pin LOW), use:

--invert

This can be useful for common anode LEDs or other devices that expect an active-low signal.

To keep pi-blaster-mqtt running in the foreground without running as a daemon use:

-D

To view help or version information, use:

--help

--version

TODO

By default this software connects to the Mosquitto broker running on the RPi. I plan to support running that broker on another host and allow a command line parameter (see above) to specify that hostname/IP address. This is not yet a high priority.

Working with Git

If you want to totally clean up the folder to get ready to do a 'git push" here's the easiest way to do it:

make distclean
git clean -xf
rm -Rf autom4te.cache/

Warnings and other caveats

Pins being used by pi-blaster will be configured as outputs. Do not plug something on an input or you might destroy it!

This daemon uses the hardware PWM generator of the raspberry pi to get precise timings. This might interfere with your sound card output. There is experimental support for a PCM time-source. If you are interested, I suggest you look at Richard Hirst original project (ServoBlaster) and try the --pcm option.

Contributors to pi-blaster-mqtt

• Greg Herlein (https://github.com/gherlein)

Contributors to pi-blaster

• Richard Hirst for ServoBlaster
• Thomas Sarlandie (https://github.com/sarfata)
• Michael Vitousek (https://github.com/mvitousek/pi-blaster)
• Pete Nelson (https://github.com/petiepooo)
• Edgar Siva (https://github.com/edgarsilva)
• Alex Lennon (https://github.com/ajlennon)
• Lara Maia (https://github.com/LaraCraft304)
• Pattrick Hüper (https://github.com/phueper)
• Boyuan Yang (https://github.com/hosiet)
• penfold42 (https://github.com/penfold42)
• Thomas McVay (https://github.com/ThomasMcVay)
• Pavle Petrovic (https://github.com/pavlecc)

Want to support this project?

The best way to contribute is to write code for the features you would like to see and to make a pull-requests.

History

Based on the most excellent pi-blaster by Thomas Sarlandie.

Pi-blaster project is based on the excellent work of Richard Hirst for ServoBlaster.

License

Released under The MIT License.

Note from Thomas Sarlandie: This project was initially released by Richard Hist under the GPL v3 License. Richard gave me explicit permission to distribute this derivative work under the MIT License.

Copyright (c) 2018 Greg Herlein - Thomas Sarlandie - Richard Hirst

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to
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rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or
sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
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The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
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THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
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