BERadio

Tip

You might want to continue reading at the official BERadio documentation, all inline links will be working there.

About

BERadio is an encoding specification and implementation for efficient communication in constrained radio link environments. It is conceived and used for over-the-air communication within the Hiveeyes project.

Together with Kotori, a multi-channel, multi-protocol data acquisition and graphing toolkit for building flexible telemetry solutions, it powers the Hiveeyes system on the gateway side, which you can enjoy by visiting the Hiveeyes platform.

Usage

Handbook

The beradio Python distribution provides convenient commandline-based decoding tools for working with messages in Bencode and BERadio formats, called beradio, bdecode, bencode, and bemqtt.

For more information, have a look at the BERadio handbook.

Synopsis

Decoding an example message on the command line.

$ bdecode d1:#i999e1:_2:h11:hli488ei572ee1:tli2163ei1925ei1092ei1354ee1:wi10677ee
OrderedDict([('#', 999), ('_', 'h1'), ('h', [488, 572]), ('t', [2163, 1925, 1092, 1354]), ('w', 10677)])

$ beradio decode d1:#i999e1:_2:h11:hli488ei572ee1:tli2163ei1925ei1092ei1354ee1:wi10677ee --protocol=2
{
    "meta": {
        "protocol": "beradio2",
        "network": "b6a6b04c-a929-4a6c-9238-185e9af79eed",
        "gateway": "deh22",
        "node": "999",
        "time": 1659487642526373120,
        "profile": "h1"
    },
    "data": {
        "hum1": 4.88,
        "hum2": 5.72,
        "temp1": 21.63,
        "temp2": 19.25,
        "temp3": 10.92,
        "temp4": 13.54,
        "wght1": 106.77
    }
}

Environment

There are a number of Arduino sensor nodes in the field communicating unidirectional via radio link to a central Arduino acting as a gateway. The gateway Arduino receives message payloads and writes them verbatim to the serial port connected to a Raspberry Pi, which transforms and forwards the messages to a MQTT bus.

The data now being on the bus, arbitrary systems can consume information by subscribing to specific MQTT topics where measurement events are delivered.

The Kotori multichannel DAQ subscribes to topics on the MQTT bus, receives telemetry data payloads and stores the measurements into a contemporary time-series database. After that, Grafana is used to display the measurement information.

Details

Features

BERadio is a specification and also provides reference implementations for Arduino and Python.

Some details have been written down in the BERadio specification document.
It uses the Bencode format on the wire to provide space-efficient data encoding.
beradio forward processes data messages received over the air and forwards them to MQTT.
libberadio will be an appropriate C++ library for Arduino.

The main workhorse

beradio forward ingests message payloads from a serial interface, sanitizes and decodes them from Bencode format and republishes the data to a MQTT topic.

The MQTT topic name used for publishing is derived from some parameters contained in the data of the message, the topic template used for this is currently programmed to {realm}/{network}/{gateway}/{node}/{field}. The actual values will get separated, mapped and formatted in different variants before republishing them to MQTT.

Project information

Contributing

We are always happy to receive code contributions, ideas, suggestions and problem reports from the community. Spend some time taking a look around, locate a bug, design issue or spelling mistake and then send us a pull request or create an issue ticket.

Thanks in advance for your efforts, we really appreciate any help or feedback.

License

Use of the source code included here is governed by the GNU Affero General Public License and the European Union Public License. The software is and will always be free and open source software.