Controlling Moteino network from .NET

[ikidd]

I was hoping to build a brewing controller using a .NET program and a USB-Moteino with a passthrough sketch to interface a few standard Moteinos running digital sensors such as DS18B20 and analog sensors such as MPX5010, as well as control a relay board for each subunit to manage valves or motors.

I've seen the python gateway.py, which is very basic, of course, and I could write a serial exchange library easily enough in .NET, but I was wondering if anyone had built a library for this purpose yet, or if there were any projects I've missed in my searches of the forum that might shortcut some of this.

[Felix]

I have not seen any others asking about .net on this forum.
You can certainly do that, but then you're stuck to .net which means windows forever.
My intent with the python script was complete portability an independence of any heavy frameworks.
Anyway I don't mean to say you should not try.

[ikidd]

Yah, I know .NET ties me down and I'd need to port again.  I should definitely try to learn Python since I ultimately would like to have the application work on a BeagleBone Black with a touch screen.

Time to learn another language, I guess.  It has been a whole decade since my last, I just really liked .NET for rapid development, its IDE, and Wysiwyg form building.  I haven't seen anything like that in the brief research I've done in Python.

[KanyonKris]

There aren't any libraries for the serial side of Moteino, nor is there any standard serial commands. Make your own commands to do what you need. Jeelabs has some semi-standard serial commands, as does EmonCMS, but I doubt those apply to your brewing project so my advice is you should make your own serial command set.

Since you know .NET I'd use that, I'm assuming you have a Windows PC dedicated to your brewing project. There's nothing magic about Python other than it's fairly easy to learn. I've never done any GUI stuff in Python yet. Seems most people do web interfaces these days instead or a GUI, but you could do both a GUI for the local PC and a web interface in .NET.

A quick search shows lots of brewing projects. Since I'm lazy, I'd start by seeing what code and other project details I could use from other projects, then adapt those elements to particulars of my project (like using Moteinos for sensing and turning things on and off).