Rule acting on serial input

[ostheer]

Hey all,

Shortly, my goal is to publish an MQTT message from my nodeMCU running ESPeasy upon receiving a message on the serial RX pin (from an Arduino). I'm attempting to do this by configuring a rule on the ESPeasy.
I've looked in these forums and in the official documentation(s), but I haven't been able to find the answer.

Closest forum post I could find was https://www.letscontrolit.com/forum/vie ... php?t=5478, but it doesn't explain fully how to get it running.
They use this rule:

Code: Select all

On Serial#myname do
publish home/ESP07/Alarm,[Serial#myname]
Endon

The documentation on https://espeasy.readthedocs.io/en/lates ... Rules.html says:

Code: Select all

on !Serial#T1018* do
  TaskValueSet 2,1,{strtol:16:{substring:13:15:%eventvalue%}}.{strtol:16:{substring:15:17:%eventvalue%}}*100/255
endon

but it isn't defined what "T1018" is.

I tried all possible combinations of turning on/off the serial server, different "on" statements, different serial input commands/messages, but to no avail. No MQTT messages are being published. (As a sanity check, the rules and mqtt config do work when I use an example rule with a timer).

Can anyone give me some basic steps I need to take to get this to work?
In particular, I have the following questions:

• How should I formulate my "on" statement (and what does it syntactically mean)?

• Should I turn on the Serial Server ("plugin")?

• How/where is the serial communication set up (baud rate, stop bits, etc.)?

Thanks in advance!
Ostheer

[ThomasB]

but it isn't defined what "T1018" is.

"T1018" is the leading characters of a serial message string that was sent to ser2net from a boiler controller. It's just a user's example that somehow found it's way into the Rule's documentation. Unfortunately the wording is very confusing to the casual reader due to poor editing.

But you don't need to use ser2net to pass values from the serial port to MQTT. Instead, a Dummy Device value can be set by the serial port and the Dummy's value can be used by your rules. See this discussion: https://www.letscontrolit.com/forum/vie ... php?t=6443

Keep in mind that if the Arduino is connected to the serial port then it can send any valid system command to ESPEasy. Here is the list of supported commands: https://www.letscontrolit.com/wiki/inde ... _Reference

- Thomas

[ostheer]

Hey Thomas,

Thanks for your reply. I sort of get what you mean, I think. However, I don't see any evidence of any rules triggering when I send serial data containing the appropriate keyword.
Luckily, your final point revealed that what I want can indeed be achieved much simpler, just sending "publish X" from the Arduino directly. Thanks! Somehow I overlooked that command, though I had used the same approach to control a servo before.

Ostheer