Good morning Opto community,
is there any chance to communicate with groov RIO by Bluetooth, not using wifi/wlan. Any other device, that I can connect to the RIO and send information from codesys to another devices?
Good morning Opto community,
is there any chance to communicate with groov RIO by Bluetooth, not using wifi/wlan. Any other device, that I can connect to the RIO and send information from codesys to another devices?
The Bluetooth capability on groov devices works on the Node-RED side. We’ve enabled Bluetooth for the Node-RED kernel, so you will need a field device that is Bluetooth capable that would plug into the USB port (or potentially the Ethernet port) on your RIO, so that Node-Red could interact with the device.
I found this on a recent blog post - [groov EPIC and groov RIO] support a limited number of Bluetooth devices through Node-RED. If you have an industrial Bluetooth device you want to use, drop us a line in the comments or at our Opto 22 forums.
So the RIO itself doesn’t have Bluetooth hardware onboard to communicate to other devices, but if you have a Bluetooth device you want to use to facilitate communication to something, that could be achievable.
@sokolowski.przemek, might I ask what you are trying to accomplish specifically?
@Dan_Opto Thank you for your reply. I make applications for my client. It will be a UV lamp that stands in the middle of the room. The client wants to have bluetooth communication with an iPad. He does not want communication over wi-fi, laying a wlan cable is not an option either…
Thanks for the extra details. Your original post sounded like you wanted to communicate with another PLC via Codesys. This is a very different path you will need to take.
Find the make and model of the UV lamp and see if there is an existing flow/node for it on https://flows.nodered.org
If not, see if there is an app for the lamp and if the app has an API.
If so, you might be able to communicate with the cloud server that the app uses via that API. (Probably over Ethernet). Doing that would not require any Bluetooth which might be the better option.
If that is not possible, then you are down to trying to reverse-engineer the lamp’s Bluetooth stack… Not easy, but there are some wireshark type tools for Bluetooth, but they come with a solid learning curve that you will need to factor in.
As Dan pointed out, Node-RED is the only option for limited Bluetooth support on both EPIC and RIO.
@Beno Sorry maybe I didn’t explain it clearly. The UV Lamp is managed by a plc controller (RIO). This is a startup. Devices have a few sensors and UV bulbs. RIO manages the application and sends information via bluetooth to the ipad. That’s all. The problem is that this device will be moved from room to room, that we can’t use a LAN cable.
Ah. Not what I thought at all. Sorry.
So RIO is mounted on the UV lamp?
Exactly. As I said, it is easy application, but client wants to send data vie bluetooth. So I thought, that dongle bluetooth inserted into RIO it will be sufficient, but as @Dan_Opto has written Rio doesn’t have Bluetooth hardware onboard.
@sokolowski.przemek I don’t understand why you wouldn’t use WiFi to connect the RIO and the iPad? Get a tiny Ethernet to WiFi router that can power right off the RIO’s USB port like this one - Amazon.com
I would like to. For me, it is easier. Firstly, costumer wants to implement some program which can easily located a device (UV lamp) by bluetooth nearly to 1m. Secondly, competitors already use a wifi solution.
The project requirements seem very fluid. Changing more and more with each post < grin >
To locate a Bluetooth device will require the device to be in / or send a beacon packet.
This is not all that uncommon, but will require the iPad to be able to pick them up and extract the signal strength. You may then also need some trilateration math to narrow its location down.
Sounds like you are or will be an expert in writing iOS apps.
I was following this and am curious of the status. Have you found to work, which one? I have an application to collect biometric data and do not want to use personal cell phones for collection.
These devices use Bluetooth LE.
We cant really buy every Bluetooth device and test each of them here (that could be 1000’s of devices at a guess).
If you have your device in hand, it would be a quick test for you to get a BLE dongle, plug it into the USB, fire up Node-RED and test the device.
There are also a lot of different Node-RED nodes for Bluetooth, so you might have to test a few of core ones that listen for advertisement beacons and then dig into the nodes that will allow you to pull more data out of the connected device.
https://flows.nodered.org/search?term=bluetooth&type=node
Bluetooth is a bit of a tough protocol where manufactures can take a lot of liberties with the standard and do their own thing. They are quite within their rights to do so, as they want to keep their customers within their Eco-system, both app and hardware, and as long that works as they state, then we cant really complain when we try and sniff the data using third party tools.
Experimentation is the key to find your options and any limits.
Lets know how you get on.