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Cayenne Agent

The Cayenne agent is a full featured client for the Cayenne IoT project builder. It sends system information as well as sensor and actuator data and responds to actuator messages initiated from the Cayenne dashboard and mobile apps. The Cayenne agent currently supports Rasbian on the Raspberry Pi but it can be extended to support additional Linux flavors and other platforms.

Requirements

  • Python 3.3 or newer.

  • pip3 - Python 3 package manager. This should already be available in Python 3.4+ and above. If not it can be installed using the system package manager. Via apt-get this would be:

    sudo apt-get install python3-pip

  • python3-dev - Python 3 header files and static library package. Via apt-get this can be installed with:

    sudo apt-get install python3-dev

  • python3-setuptools - Python 3 setuptools package. This should already be available in Python 3.4+ and above. If not it can be installed using the system package manager. Via apt-get this would be:

    sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools

All of the above packages can be installed at once via apt-get by running:

sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev python3-setuptools

Getting Started

Installation

The agent can be installed by navigating to the root directory of the agent code and running:

sudo python3 setup.py install

Launching the Agent

After install the agent can be launched by running the myDevices module from python:

python3 -m myDevices

If you have not installed the Raspberry Pi on the device before you will be prompted to enter an invite code when the agent is first run. You can get the invite code from the Cayenne dashboard with the following steps.

  1. Create an account at https://cayenne.mydevices.com, if you do not already have one.
  2. Select Add New...->Device/Widget->Single Board Computer->Raspberry Pi.
  3. Under Option 2 you will see some Linux commands. You do not need to run these commands. Instead you can get the invite code from the script name: rpi_[invitecode].sh.
  4. Enter that invite code at the agent prompt and press Enter.
  5. The agent will run and connect to Cayenne and your device will show up in the device list.

Potential conflicts with the Cayenne service

If you have already have installed the Cayenne agent service via the Cayenne dashboard you might see some conflicts if you also try running this agent manually. To get around this you can do one of the following:

  1. Uninstall the Cayenne agent service.

    sudo /etc/myDevices/uninstall/uninstall.sh

  2. Shut down the Cayenne agent service.

    1. Open crontab for editing.

      sudo crontab -e

    2. Comment out or remove the myDevices cron job to prevent the service from automatically restarting, then save and exit.

    3. Stop the Cayenne service.

      sudo service myDevices stop

    4. Optionally, disable the Cayenne service from starting at boot.

      sudo systemctl disable myDevices

  3. Run this agent module in place of the Cayenne agent service, instead of from the command line.

    sudo service myDevices start

Other potential issues caused by running this agent along side the Cayenne service:

  • File/folder permissions issues - The permissions for files and folders used by this agent, including /var/log/myDevices, /etc/myDevices, /var/run/myDevices and files inside those folders, could conflict with the permissions set by the agent service installed from Cayenne. To get around this issue you can manually modify the file and folder permissions, reinstall the agent, or run the agent as a service as explained above.
  • Agent update - The Cayenne agent will automatically update itself if a new agent becomes available which can overwrite the installation of this agent. You may need to reinstall this agent if that happens. To completely disable updates you can add the line DoUpdates = false to /etc/myDevices/AppSettings.ini.

Development

The agent can be installed for doing development in place by navigating to the root directory of the agent code and running:

sudo python3 setup.py develop

When running the agent logs information to stderr as well as /var/log/myDevices/cayenne.log. To enable additional debug logging use the -d option on the command line:

python3 -m myDevices -d

Currently the agent has code for interfacing with several sensors and actuators and support for the Raspberry Pi. If you would like to extend that you can add support for additional sensors, actuators and boards as described below.

Supporting Additional Sensors/Actuators

To add support for additional sensors/actuators you may need to create new plugins for the specific sensors/actuators. Information about adding plugins can be found in the Example Plugin README file. Additional plugin repos you can look at for examples are here.

Creating a new sensor/actuator plugin

  1. Create a new Python module with a class to read data from and, if applicable, to write data to the sensor/actuator.
  2. Add a .plugin file under the /etc/myDevices/plugins directory or a subfolder within that directory. This file should describe the Python module, class and functions to use for reading/writing data. See the Example Plugin README file for information about the .plugin file format.
  3. Restart the agent to load the plugin and start sending data. Temporary widgets for the plugin should now show up in the Cayenne Dashboard. You can make them permanent by clicking the plus sign. If the widgets do not show up try refreshing the Dashboard or restarting the agent again.

Note: For security reasons the Cayenne agent is designed to be able to run from an account without root privileges. If any of your sensor/actuator code requires root access consider running just that portion of your code via a separate process that can be launched using sudo. For an example see the Sense HAT Plugin which installs a service to access Sense HAT data.

Supporting Additional Boards

To add support for additional boards beyond the Raspberry Pi you may need to modify I/O, system info and/or settings modules as required for the board.

Pin and Bus I/O

Current support for pin and bus I/O is based on the Linux filesystem drivers used on the Raspberry Pi. To support a different board you may need to update the agent code for the following items, depending on what functionality the board has:

Native GPIO Pins
Native GPIO pin support is provided in myDevices.devices.digital.gpio.py. This uses the Linux file system drivers under /sys/class/gpio for reading and writing to GPIO pins. It also uses the /dev/gpiomem memory map to determine pin modes. If your board is a Linux based board that supports the same filesystem drivers at the same location you may be able to use this code as-is. Otherwise you may need to modify the filesystem driver location or replace the drivers with a some other method or library for reading and writing GPIO values. If your board doesn't support the /dev/gpiomem memory mapped file you may be able to get the same pin mode info from /dev/mem or perhaps another GPIO library. Or just fallback to using the filesystem drivers and only get basic pin modes.
SPI Bus
SPI bus support is provided in myDevices.devices.spi.py. This uses the Linux file system drivers under /dev/spidev0.*. If your board is a Linux based board that supports the same filesystem drivers at the same location you may be able to use this code as-is. Otherwise you may need to modify the filesystem driver location or replace the drivers with a some other method or library for reading and writing SPI values.
I²C Bus
I²C bus support is provided in myDevices.devices.i2c.py. This uses the Linux file system drivers under /dev/i2c-*. If your board is a Linux based board that supports the same filesystem drivers at the same location you may be able to use this code as-is. Otherwise you may need to modify the filesystem driver location or replace the drivers with a some other method or library for reading and writing I²C values.
1-Wire Bus
1-Wire bus support is provided in myDevices.devices.onewire.py. This uses the Linux file system drivers under /sys/bus/w1/devices. If your board is a Linux based board that supports the same filesystem drivers at the same location you may be able to use this code as-is. Otherwise you may need to modify the filesystem driver location or replace the drivers with a some other method or library for reading and writing 1-Wire values.
Serial Bus
Serial bus support is provided in myDevices.devices.serial.py This uses the Linux file system drivers under /dev/ttyAMA0. Currently Cayenne doesn't support any sensors or actuators using the serial bus so you probably don't need to support this, unless you add some sensor or actuator that requires it.
Loading/Unloading Bus Kernel Modules
Support for loading/unloading bus kernel modules is provided in myDevices.devices.bus.py. This uses the Linux program modprobe. If your board uses the same bus kernel modules and supports modprobe you may be able to use this code as-is. Otherwise you may need to update the modules listed in BUSLIST and/or modify the code to load the kernel modules. If you don't need to support loading the bus kernel modules you can stub out this code.

System info

Information about the device, including CPU, RAM, etc., is currently retrieved via a few different modules. To support a different board you may need to update the agent code for the following items, if applicable:

General System Info
General system info, including CPU, RAM, memory, etc. is retrieved via myDevices.system.systeminfo.py and myDevices.system.cpu.py. These are mostly implemented using cross platform libraries so they may already provide support for your board. If not, they should be modified or overridden to provide the appropriate system info. If your board does not support all the data values currently implemented you can just provide default values where necessary, though this may affect the data display in the Cayenne dashboard.
Hardware Info
Hardware info, including make, model, etc. is retrieved via myDevices.system.hardware.py. This should be modified or overridden to provide the appropriate hardware info for your board.
Pin Mapping
The mapping of the on-board pins is provided in myDevices.devices.digital.gpio.py with the MAPPING list. This list provides the available GPIO pin numbers as well as the voltage ("V33", "V50"), ground ("GND") and do-not-connect ("DNC") pins. This should be updated with the mapping for your board. However, the Cayenne dashboard is currently built to display the Raspberry Pi GPIO layout so if your board's pin layout is significantly different it may not display correctly in the GPIO tab.

Settings

Currently the Raspberry Pi agent has settings for enabling/disabling the device tree, SPI, I²C, serial and camera. These are set via the myDevices.system.raspiconfig module which runs a separate Bash script at /etc/myDevices/scripts/config.sh. If any of these settings are available on your board and you would like to support them you can override or replace myDevices.system.raspiconfig.py. Otherwise the settings functionality can be ignored.

Note: For security reasons the Cayenne agent is designed to be able to run from an account without root privileges. If any of your I/O, system info or settings code requires root access consider running it via a separate process that can be launched using sudo. For example, the myDevices.system.raspiconfig module uses this method to update config settings.

Contributing

The Cayenne agent is an open source project and welcomes your contributions, including:

  • Bug reports and fixes
  • Documentation improvements
  • Additional sensor/actuator support
  • Additional board support
  • Other code enhancements

Cayenne Community

Join us on Slack at slack.mydevices.com or in the Cayenne Community.

License

MIT