Introduction

Typically I have the iCharger plugged into a Raspberry Pi 3, and I develop either on a Windows or Mac laptop.

The code runs as a series of microservices using Docker for deployment.

Checking in code on a laptop in order to pull it via Git into the runtime environment is a total pain, therefore I am using syncthing to keep code in sync between multiple dev devices and the runtime world of Docker.

Syncthing is an opensource multi-master synchronisation service that runs on almost anything (yay), and is secure (yay), but it a pain in the butt to set up (boo). Enter the tools in the syncthing/ directory to help with this (yay).

To get a dev system up and running, you will need:

• a dev laptop - anything, Mac/Windows will do
• a runtime device + an iCharger 4010 Duo

Syncthing Preparation

Syncthing uses PKI technology to identify endpoints (machines/devices). To setup the development environment you will need the following identities:

• Raspberry Pi 3 machine, that runs Docker, name: charger
• Dev machine, that is Win or Mac, name: dev-host

Generate a syncthing identity for each device. All identities are included the config for the syncthing service. If you create a new identity afterwards, you will need to re-create the docker images for each deployment device/context.

Create deployment images for the services, these get baked into the docker runtime images

Deploy and enjoy - everything just works because syncthing uses Dynamic lookup.

THE OLD INTERFACE

Prerequisites:

• libusb - compiled via 3rdparty directory
• q4 + dev tools
• libsodium
• zeromq

I installed libsodium then zeromq from the net. The cppzmg library that comes with nzmqt is old and errors out due to missing zmq_event_t type - go get the latest single cppzmq.hpp from git and replace the file in 3rdparty/include.

Arch

Everything hangs together based on ZeroMQ. This allows me to write the components in whatever language I want, applicable to the task at hand.

Compiling libusb

Install libudev via this: apt-get install libudev0

USB Interface

The iCharger communicates via USB. It's driven by the icharger_usb program that provides the following service end-points: req/resp - settings & commands pub/sub - state of the device

For example, to get information about the iCharger system you would do the following:

- connect to all zeromq end points
- send an INIT_DONE request to the icharger_usb command interface
- wait for a INIT_CONFIRMED response from the publisher, this contains the initial state snapshot

After this has been done, further state responses are received on the pub/sub bus as any data changes. The frequencly of updates is controlled by the icharger_usb service.

Installing the Raspian Image from Mac

Go get Raspian from: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

To overwrite the SD card (16 gig minimum), find the disk number (not partition):

diskutil list diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2 sudo dd bs=1m if=.img of=/dev/rdisk2

Boot the image and run: sudo raspi-config

Change it to boot to console instead of UI, change GPU mem to 256 MB.

Modify the apt sources to get Qt 5 - uncomment the deb-src line: sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Then update apt: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get build-dep qt4-x11 sudo apt-get build-dep libqt5gui5 sudo apt-get install libudev-dev libinput-dev libts-dev libxcb-xinerama0-dev

sudo mkdir /usr/local/qt5pi sudo chown pi:pi /usr/local/qt5pi