I first used a Raspberry Pi when I was working in Leicester and I bought one for home not long after that. I set it up as a file/media server and it has been sitting in the front room quietly doing its job since then.

Last year I bought a Pi 3 and an electronics starter kit (which consisted of a breadboard, LEDs, switches and various other components) so I could learn how to connect things to the Pi.

A few weeks ago I was given a NodeMCU development board (my friend Tim has already written about some of his experiments with his).

I followed the instructions on flashing the firmware and getting a script running. For some reason the ESPlorer software doesn't seem to behave well on my computer. It usually takes several rounds of restarting/resetting/reconnecting before it will agree to communicate with it. The command line tools have no problems, neither does CoolTerm. After a day when it felt like I was spending half of my time struggling to get ESPlorer to connect properly, I decided to ditch it and use the nodemcu-uploader command line instead.

The first thing I wrote was the Hello World of the microcontroller world: the flashing LEDs. The next stage was to use the serial ports to connect the Raspberry Pi and the NodeMCU together.

Setting up the Raspberry Pi Serial Port

By default, the serial port on the Pi is configured to be used for a serial console , mainly for diagnostics. To use it for other things, you need to disable the console. There are lots of different instructions to do this but for the Pi 3 it boils down to editing the /boot/config.txt file and adding the line

enable_uart=1

followed by editing /boot/cmdline.txt and removing the

console=serial0,115200

entry. After rebooting the Pi, the GPIO pins 14 & 15 should be available for the serial port.

Writing the script for the NodeMCU

I took my flashing LED script and modified it to listen to the serial port. Sending 'r','g' or 'b' will light up the respective LEDs, any other character will turn them off. If the following script is saved as serial.lua, it can be uploaded to the NodeMCU using

python nodemcu-uploader.py -port /dev/serial0 upload serial.lua

as long as the NodeMCU Uploader has been installed first.

-- Listen on the serial port for a colour.
-- Toggle the colour of the LED.

green=2
blue=1
red=3
gpio.mode(red,gpio.OUTPUT)
gpio.mode(green,gpio.OUTPUT)
gpio.mode(blue,gpio.OUTPUT)

-- Start with the LEDs off
gpio.write(red,gpio.LOW)
gpio.write(green,gpio.LOW)
gpio.write(blue,gpio.LOW)

uart.setup(0,115200,8, uart.PARITY_NONE, uart.STOPBITS_1, 1)

uart.on("data",1,
    function(char)
        if char=="r" then
            print("red")
            gpio.write(red,gpio.HIGH)
            gpio.write(green,gpio.LOW)
            gpio.write(blue,gpio.LOW)
        elseif char=="g" then 
            print("green")
            gpio.write(red,gpio.LOW)
            gpio.write(green,gpio.HIGH)
            gpio.write(blue,gpio.LOW)
            lighton=2
        elseif char=="b" then
            print("blue")
            gpio.write(red,gpio.LOW)
            gpio.write(green,gpio.LOW)
            gpio.write(blue,gpio.HIGH)
        else
            print("Off")
            gpio.write(red,gpio.LOW)
            gpio.write(green,gpio.LOW)
            gpio.write(blue,gpio.LOW)
        end
    end,0)

The script can be run using

python nodemcu-uploader.py -port /dev/serial0 file do serial.lua

Getting the Pi to talk to the NodeMCU

I connected the RX GPIO pin on the Pi to the TX pin on the NodeMCU, and vice versa. The easiest way of powering the NodeMCU was to use the power out pins from the Pi. I found that connecting the 5V out to Vin on the NodeMCU worked reliably. If I had the Pi plugged into a good quality USB power adaptor then I could sometimes get it to work by connecting one of the 3.3V pins of the Pi to one of the 3.3V pins of the NodeMCU board, but this isn't guaranteed to work.

The script uses the serial port library, which can be installed using

sudo apt-get install python-serial

The Python script is fairly simple and just cycles through the LEDs a few times. The third line runs the lua script, in case it wasn't already running. There isn't a pause between cycling between the LEDs but the serial timeout is set to 1 second and the port.read(100) command attempts to read 100 bytes. Since there should only be the colour names being returned, this automatically adds a 1 second delay. This might not be very good programming practice but it was the easiest way of incorporating reading a variable length response and adding a pause all at once.

import serial

port = serial.Serial("/dev/serial0", baudrate=115200, parity=serial.PARITY_NONE, timeout=1.0)

port.write("dofile('serial.lua')\r\n")

for i in range(1,10):
    for c in ['r','g','b']:
    port.write(c)
        r = port.read(100)
        print(r)

Flashing LEDs

This first demonstration is pretty trivial, although it took a few days of trial and error to get everything working. In due course I'll experiment with connecting different sensors to the Pi and NodeMCU.

I think my next step is to use Java on the Pi to do the same thing. I have had a quick look at Java serial port stuff and it isn't as straightforward as Python but since I do most of my programming in Java these days, it will be useful to know how to do that.