For Developers

Background

At a club I help at, we’ve just done a small two-week project involving three Raspberry Pi boxes: one controlling a motor to drive a turntable; one detecting hits against targets mounted on the turntable; and one stopping and starting the turntable and adding up the scores. They talked to each other over WiFi.

Previously, we entered a robot for PiWars and used WiFi to control the robot from a laptop with a SNES-like controller attached.

In both cases the use of network was very simple: send a command (START, STOP, LEFT etc.) possibly with one or more parameters (eg LEFT 0.5). Under the covers we used ZeroMQ which offers a robust layer on top of standard sockets. Although ZeroMQ offers a simple and consistent API, even that’s a little too much for newcomers both to networks and programming.

In addition, a constant challenge was discovering the other “nodes” on the network in the face of DHCP changes and switching from development to live networks.

So in the spirit of PyGame Zero and GPIO Zero, I’m offering Network Zero which depends on ZeroMQ and allows you to:

  • Discover services
  • Send / Reply
  • Publish / Subscribe
  • Switch painlessly between one and more than one machine

Services

One of the challenges which is particular to the classroom is that you may not know how to address the box which a service is running on. Even if you give your boxes static IPs (and you probably don’t) or well-known hostnames then you need some way of knowing easily what IP or name it has. If you’re using DHCP (and you probably are) then you can’t even write the IP on a sticky label. All this is exacerbated as kids switch machine between session and can be as true for a classroom laptop set as much as it is for a Raspberry Pi lab.

In addition, the services may be run on the same or a different box which may be running the same or a different Operating System.

In the robot example above we have two “services”: the robot RPi and the controller laptop. They need to find and talk to each other without knowing their respective IPs in advance. This is especially true if we are developing using a local WiFi or even Ethernet setup but testing or running live with the robot itself becoming an AP.

For the turntable project, we have three RPis: the Turntable listens for commands; the Detector publishes hits; and the Controller sends commands and subscribes to hits. For development, we want to run two or more of those services on the same box, using different processes.

NB this is a different problem to what DNS solves: we don’t want to discover hosts, we want to discover services, and in a fairly transparent manner. It’s the same kind of problem which zeroconf is solving. [http://www.zeroconf.org/]

Basic Offering

While the networkzero package will hopefully be of wider use, its target audience is teachers or organisers of group sessions where a – possibly heterogenous – collection of machines will want to pass messages simply across a network.

The package offers two things which will be of use to people running an educational project in a lab situation where machines and addresses change:

  • Advertising and discovery of other programs
  • Simple but robust message sending

The first is achieved by having each program fire up a “beacon” which advertises services by name, indicating the port they are listening on. Other programs listen for those service adverts until they find the one they are looking for.

The second uses ZeroMQ socket abstractions to reduce obstacles arising from the order in which processes start up; and to ensure that messages arrive complete regardless of network latency &c.

These two are offered independently of each other: the discovery aspect will leave you with an IP address and a port number. The message aspect needs an IP address and a port number. But you don’t need one to use the other: it just makes it simpler.