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Lagarto, open automation platform

posted Apr 14, 2012, 5:01 AM by Daniel Berenguer

The panStamp project has been presented on indiegogo. At the same time, Lagarto is being released as the "official" automation platform for SWAP networks (and hence for panStamps). Unlike the opnode project, Lagarto has not been designed for a specific hardware. Any platform with support for Python 2.7 should be able to run Lagarto servers and clients without problems.
Lagarto is a distributed solution based on the client-server paradigm. Lagarto servers connect to real M2M networks whilst clients connect to those servers. Connectivity between servers and clients is achieved via HTTP GET/POST commands and ZeroMQ.

At the moment of writing this post only two Lagarto processes are available: Lagarto-SWAP and Lagarto-MAX... but new processes are in the works.

  • Lagarto-SWAP is the lagarto server that connects to SWAP networks. This servers acts as a pure SWAP-IP gateway, letting other processes (ex: lagarto clients) access panStamps via IP.
  • Lagarto-MAX is a lagarto client capable to consume values coming from any lagarto server. It presents data t the user in a homogeneous way, regardless of their origins. This client also runs an event manager programmable via Web. This event manager can control servers' endpoints and upload values to cloud data services (Pachube, ThingSpeak, ...).
I've tested Lagarto in an old NSLU2 and on a PogoPlug. No problems of speed, even for the limited Slug. I admit that things have changed since I started working in embedded computing. No more need to develop applications exclusively under C or C++, PlugComputers and RaspberryPI's provide so much computing power and memory that anyone can develop embedded applications using Java, Python or even Perl. And what to say about those old MMU-less linux platforms that forced us to manually align arrays and structures... big improvements...

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