Basestation does not connect to relay board

Hardware
1

I received the:
Relay Controller 1-Channel General Purpose SPDT + 8 Channel ADC ProXR Lite - 5 Amp SPDT, and the
WiFi Communications Module with Bluetooth USB MQTT

I have downloaded and installed the Basestation software.
The Relay board is connected to a 12VDC supply
The Relay board is also connected via USB to a Windows 10 computer. The USB device is recognized at a “Silicon Labs CP210x USB to UART Bridge(COM11)”

At startup, the comm board displays a blue and a red LED, that quickly changes to green and red, then to just the red LED flashing twice in quick succession.

When I run Basestation and select COM11 and 115200 baudrate and click OK, Basestation tries to connect and displays a message (The controller did not respond at the baud rate you selected), tries a bunch of other rates, fails and exits.

It does not advertise for Bluetooth pairing, and does not show up as a WiFi access point.

Any suggestions as to how I can get Basestation to talk to the relay module?

Thanks,

jw

2

Any suggestions at all from the company on this one?

I have spent a fair amount of time trying to get you product to be recognized by my Windows machine, to no avail. I posted a fairly detail description of the problem above, and heard nothing at all.

Any help at all here, or it is just RMA time?

3

Hi,

Are you supplying 12VDC to the relay controller the module is installed in? It cannot be powered over USB, it requires 12VDC.

4

Yes. As mentioned in the original post, above: The Relay board is connected to a 12VDC supply

5

IMG_20210119_111403386
IMG_20210119_1114033864000×3000 2.9 MB

6

Ultimately, there was incorrect firmware in the radio module. The company supplied a radio module with the correct firmware, and I was able to
a) push the ‘c’ button to take the radio module to configuration mode,
b) connected to the radio module via WiFi (NCD_NexGen/NCDBeast)
c) went to the associated URL at http://172.217.28.1/ (Caution: This is google’s URL. Make sure you subnetting is setup correctly
d) On the web page, turned on bluetooth.

After that, the steps I used to configure an embedded Debian system to talk to the relay board are as follows:

The following commands enabled communication with the NCD.io relay board from a Debian Linux system (Debian 9.12 stretch)

Note: For whatever reason, the rfcomm executable refused to run with rfcomm built into the kernel (It would generate Protocol Not Supported errors). Rebuilding the kernel with rfcomm built as a module resolved this issue. (?)

Note2: Not absolutely sure we need to pair using bluetoothctl first, but that is what I did, and it ended up working. The bluetoothctl dialog below is paraphrased. YMMV.

use bluetoothctl to pair with the device

$ bluetoothctl

power on
scan on

wait for device to appear

Discovery started
[CHG] Controller 00:19:86:00:3D:50 Discovering: yes
…
[CHG] Device 30:AE:A4:D8:88:4A NexGen
…
scan off

trust 30:AE:A4:D8:88:4A

Changing 30:AE:A4:D8:88:4A trust succeeded

pair 30:AE:A4:D8:88:4A

message indicating successful pairing

devices
Device 30:AE:A4:D8:88:4A NexGen

The above is persistent across reboots, so only needs to be done once. It appears

The following is required for each reboot.

bring up the local Bluetooth device

$ hciconfig hci0 up

look for the NCD device

$ hcitool scan
Scanning …
30:AE:A4:D8:88:4A NexGen

we found the MAC, now browse it with sdptool

$ sdptool browse 30:AE:A4:D8:88:4A

Browsing 30:AE:A4:D8:88:4A …
Service RecHandle: 0x10000
Service Class ID List:
“Generic Attribute” (0x1801)
Protocol Descriptor List:
“L2CAP” (0x0100)
PSM: 31
“ATT” (0x0007)
uint16: 0x0001
uint16: 0x0005

Service RecHandle: 0x10001
Service Class ID List:
“Generic Access” (0x1800)
Protocol Descriptor List:
“L2CAP” (0x0100)
PSM: 31
“ATT” (0x0007)
uint16: 0x0014
uint16: 0x001c

Service Name: ESP32SPP
Service RecHandle: 0x10002
Service Class ID List:
“Serial Port” (0x1101)
Protocol Descriptor List:
“L2CAP” (0x0100)
“RFCOMM” (0x0003)
Channel: 1
Profile Descriptor List:
“Serial Port” (0x1101)
Version: 0x0102

note the channel number of the Serial Port interface above (Channel: 1)

call rfcomm to bind device /dev/rfcomm0 to the Channel #1 interface on the device’s mac address

$ rfcomm bind rfcomm0 30:AE:A4:D8:88:4A 1

verify that the device is bound (clean)

$ rfcomm -a
rfcomm0: 30:AE:A4:D8:88:4A channel 1 clean

verify that the newly created device exists:

$ ls -lt /dev/rfcomm0
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 216, 0 Feb 4 01:37 /dev/rfcomm0

set the port parameters to 115200 bps, no handshaking

$ stty -F /dev/rfcomm0 ispeed 115200 ospeed 115200 -crtscts -ixon -ixoff

turn the #1 relay on, using the API. This should cause the relay to audibly energize and a red LED to light up

$ echo -en ‘\xaa\x03\xfe\x6c\x01\x18’ > /dev/rfcomm0

turn the #1 relay off, using the API. This should cause the relay to audibly de-energize and the red LED to turn off

$ echo -en ‘\xaa\x03\xfe\x64\x01\x10’ > /dev/rfcomm0