Embedded Linux Project 1

UDP Communication Project on Raspberry Pi

Description

Testing User Datagram Protocol (UDP) communications on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. The Raspberry Pi sends simulated 3-phase power data to a host device in a Local Area Network through an UDP port and the data is visualized real-time using Python.

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Overview

The executables (under the bin directory) for threephasegenerator and threephaseforwarder are first run on the Raspberry Pi to start listening on the specified UDP ports (6367 and 5367). The python script udp_3phase is then run on the host device to send an array of options for the simulated 3 phase power data, such as the added noise, time step, frequency and debug mode, to start the simulation. The threephaseforwarder script receives the array and acts as a gate to relay the communications to the threephasegenerator script. The simulated data is then sent back to threephaseforwarder, which relays it back to the host device and is displayed real-time.

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Setup

Host Code Development

The development of the host code happens on the host device. The host device is a Windows 10 desktop running Windows Subsystem for Linux (v1) with Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS and VSCode (v1.46.1) with the remote SSH development, C/C++, and Python extensions. The Python extension uses a conda (v4.8.3) environment (provided).

Embedded Code Development

The development of the embedded source code happens on the host device and the compilation happens on the Raspberry Pi. Once the source code is updated on the host device, a VSCode compound task uses rsync for synchronization and ssh commands for remote compilation using cmake (v3.6.2) on the Raspberry Pi. This remote compilation strategy was chosen over an emulator such as qemu due to the emulation performance decrease, which could impact the build time for more complex projects.

Getting Started

To replicate this project, first clone the repo on both the host and the embedded device by running:

• git clone https://github.com/alemorm/embedded_udp_3phase.git ~/

• Optional: Either compile the code using the VSCode build task using CTRL + SHIFT + B or use the pre-compiled binaries provided (BCM2709: quad-core ARMv7).

  • If building the source code, make sure to install cmake (>v3.0) on the Raspberry Pi with:

    • sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install cmake

  • Then build the binaries with the following command:

    • cd ~/embedded_udp_3phase/build && cmake .. && make

• SSH to the Raspberry Pi and run the newly created binaries by:

  • cd ~/embedded_udp_3phase/
  • bin/threephaseforwarder &
  • bin/threephasegenerator &

• On the host device, run the python script udp_3phase by:

  • cd ~/embedded_udp_3phase/
  • conda env create -f environment.yml
  • conda activate embeddedudp
  • python scripts/udp_3phase.py

Alternative Visualizations