easy-touch-raspberry-pi

EasyTouch controller implemented on a Raspberry Pi

What is this project?

This project came from a desire to teach my kids something about programming. I have wanted to work with a Raspberry Pi for some time now, and this seems like a good project.

I have a wireless Easy-Touch system, but it got some corrosion on the remote's Menu button (the most important one) and stopped responding to any keypress. I called Pentair and they do not service the unit. They suggested I purchase a new one which runs about $500 for the controller and $125 for the receiver. Uhh, can you say "no way"?

Materials

I have also bought a LinkSprite RS485/GPIO Shield for Raspberry Pi which will be the interface to the Pentair Easy-Touch controller.

• $40 for the Raspberry Pi
• $12 for the LinkSprite RS-485/GPIO Shield
• The book Getting Started with Raspberry Pi

For about $60 I would be out ahead.

Development environment

Here's a close up with the RS-485 board plugged in, and a pull back of the local development environment on my kitchen counter.

Work log

This is a running diary of work that was done.

2014-06-02

Downloaded NOOBS and formated SD card, copied over NOOBS to SD card. Hooked up Raspberry Pi and selected Raspbian as the OS. Created Github project and started putting all the stuff I collected in the repository.

The RS-485 board I have is kind of weird. Instead of having a line that you pull to VCC or GND, it relies on the TX data line to only drive the differential pair when a low is transmitted. Essentially, the driver only drives zeros on the line. This is something that may be a problem in the future.

I also got an AA battery I had and hooked it up to the A/B data line. When the B side is more positive the RX LED lights up.) So, this means that the natural state of the bus should be where the lower voltage is on the B side. Conversely, the bus is normally in a "1" state where the A side is more positive. If you read the Wikipedia article and just transpose A/B then everything works out. So much for standards. Hopefully, this will work out with the pool controller.

2014-06-03

I hooked up a phone line pair to the controller. The controller seemed to have 4 wires: Power, D+, D-, and GND (Note the 2 more positive lines close together -- at least that is how I remember it). I had a pair of standard 4 pair Cat 3 wire, so I hooked up WHT/BLUE to D+ and BLUE to D- in the controller. I always remember "Red is Ring" but try to keep tip as the positive side of things, so the WHT/BLUE line is always my designated line and hooked up as tip or positive. As a POTS line, tip is ground and ring is -48VDC, so tip is still more positive!

On the other side of the phone line wire, I hooked up WHT/BLUE (tip) to the RS-485 A side and BLUE (ring) to the B side. Not sure why I am carrying POTS terms to RS-485. I also i put a 1K resister across the A/B line as the line length is about 30 feet of wire (I didn't want to cut it yet).

From my understanding of the MAX481 datasheet, the A line is the non-inverting line, and the B line is the inverting. Also, a more positive voltage on the A line is a logic 1 on the TTL side.

I wrote a small python program (src/010_read_port) to talk to the serial port and dump the hex bytes that I receive. The RX LED seems to blink like there is some small and larger data packets, so it's looking good. I do decode the string "Intellichlor" every so often, so that's a good sign that I am wired correctly.

2014-06-04

I was having network problems with my Raspberry Pi ethernet, and it turns out it was a bad connection on the RJ-45 jack of my internal home wiring. I wire my networking with with EIA-568B and pair 3 had a bad connection at the wall jack but it is fixed now. There was much rejoicing with reliable 100Base-T networking.

I created a knock off of the Pentair protocol sniffer and found my header sync bytes are different than other documentation that I found. So now I am busy trying to make sense of it all. Might take some time. See (src/020_packet_frame)

2014-06-10

Created (src/030_pool_app) and started creating some threading classes. One thread will be the serial port routine, and the other thread will be the http server. They will talk to eachother via redis which will serve as an in-memory cache. I am hoping to stuff value data pairs into redis that the web server can easily retrieve and display. This will also allow the circuit names to be changed for different configurations.

I also confirmed the checksum packet calculation and verified things seem to be working.

I am starting to understand Python a little bit better and how modules are defined and used in another python file. So far so good.

2014-06-14

Put together the outline of the commanding and threading tasks. So far, there is a serial thread that decodes the status messages and stores them to a redis database as a redis hash. It also listens to a command queue for command messages. I still have to implement the commands. These commands are put into the command queue by another thread that is a redis subscriber. The third thread is the http thread that will respond to queuies. If a request is posted (still to be implemented) from the http thread, it will be published to the redis queue, where it will be forwarded on to the serial thread. The purpose for all this is that the redis subscriber is a blocking call, so that is why we use the Queue between the threads. - 2016-06-17 I think redis has non blocking methods in it so I should have looked at non-blocking subscriber calls if there are any.

All the structure is in place, and the http thread is sending NOP messages once a second. The serial thread sees these and sometimes has to process multiple messages because it is waiting for 50 serial bytes to come in before it begins processing.

2014-06-16

Added the display of the pool state to the web page, which is found at http://localhost:8000 (on the Raspberry Pi), or navigate to whatever the IP address is and port 8000. There's still some debug stuff going on, but that will be cleaned up later. Still need to handle the POST message and send that via redis pub/sub to serial thread.

Because the http thread does a serve_forever(), it seems the best way to stop the thing is to CTRL-z to background the process and then kill it with a

kill %<jobnumber>

which is usually

kill %1

It would be nice to find a way for the HTTPServer to stop. - 2016-06-17 Finally cleaned this mess up. CTRL-C now informs the other threads to end, and a dummy message is published to redis so the blocking call will get a message, then check the exit status, and end.

2014-06-18

Started work on the change.py script which is the post action from the status page. Need to build the changes and send them as commands to the redis pubsub channel.

Also, both the index and change pages output and accept JSON messages if the query string includes '?json=1', so a JSON request would be to http://localhost:8000/?json=1 (by default, if no page is specified then / turns into index.py, to you could also use http://localhost:8000/index.py?json=1 to get a json configuration back. Note that the mime type is application/json, so don't get fooled by that.

2014-06-19

Implemented the full loop control, so now the form on the web page ends up sending a message to the serial thread, which builds a packet and sends it out the RS-485 port. I need to figure out the temperature settings now and see how to change the temperature -- mainly for the spa!

2014-06-23

Implemented pool and spa temperature setpoint on web and JSON GET and PUTs. It might take a minute to get a broadcast temperature setpoint message, so I need to clean up how that works later. If you start the program up and then immediately set a setpoint, then you could end up with some undesired default value. What you set the temps to in the status page is what you get.

2014-06-24

Added password support in the form of a md5 hash of a token. It has to match in order for the change.py PUT to succeed. Modified my firehol routing to do port forwarding to the Raspberry Pi and now I can control the pool from outside the home.

To set the password, run

set_password.py

from the src/030_pool_app directory. You can then run

check_hash.py

and look for the link underneath "password". That is the md5 hash (without the quotes) to use as the token in the PUT response from the form or JSON message.

2016-06-16

Cleaned up the program termination code so it now exits when CTRL-C is pressed. There seem to be some packets from the pool controller and the outside oddball HTML requests that kill the system. Still waiting for them to come in again so I can understand why python croaks.