A year ago, we released the Wiren Board Smart Home controller. Due to the low price and wide opportunities, he was a success among enthusiasts.

Therefore, we decided not to stop and released a new version - a controller for the automation of Wiren Board 4, to which we also wrote a new software.
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Despite the name, customers often used Wiren Board Smart Home for non-domestic tasks: collecting climatic parameters, polling meters and sensors, and remotely controlling equipment — that is, as a universal logic controller.

Wiren Board 4 (both in hardware and software) is better suited for such tasks. Home users have this also touched - the controller has become more reliable.

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Electronics controller has undergone deep processing. At the same time, where possible, compatibility with the previous version remained.
The changes are mainly related to the elimination of the identified deficiencies:

• Input protection and general noise immunity. All inputs are protected against accidental voltage up to 24V.
• The input voltage range has been extended to 9–24 V, i.e. two common standards in automation, 12 and 24V, are supported.
• Added hardware watchdog timer. This is an important thing if the controller is far away from you.
• One of the RS-485 ports is galvanically isolated.
• Protection against battery charge at low temperatures.
• Added inputs for “dry contacts”. Connection of meters with pulse outputs, external switches, etc.
• Removed CAN from the main board.
• And, of course, multi-colored push terminals! Installation is now faster and more reliable.

Production of the controller even with minimal modifications is very expensive, both in time and in money.

Therefore, in order to make it more flexible, we left room for expansion scarves, and allocated 3 terminals for it. Power, UART, I2C, SPI are output to the extension connector. Now there are scarves with RS-232, also planned with CAN and DAC (0-10V).

Web interface

For the release of Wiren Board 4, we have released a new web interface.
Initially, we assumed that the controller will be used with third-party interfaces. It turned out that existing systems are poorly suited - their capabilities are either not enough, or they are slow, or they cannot be expanded.

In our local HomeUI web interface, the standard automation concepts are supported: “rooms”, dashboards, and the view is detached from the physical connection. The interface is written in Angular using web sockets and Bootstrap, it works quickly, does not load the controller and looks decent on mobile devices.

Of course, the existing options for connecting to third-party systems Majordomo and OpenHAB continue to work.

Rule engine

We also made a powerful wb-rules rule system. The rule engine deserves a separate story, and we will soon write an article about it. The engine allows you to write rules and scripts, create virtual devices, schedule actions for a specified time, handle events.

The rules are written in JavaScript, and a person with no programming skills can easily figure it out.

Peripherals

A lot of work has been done in the system software - in the drivers for embedded devices and external peripherals:

• driver for Modbus-RTU. Modbus is a standard for wired peripheral actuators and sensors. For many devices with which we tested the work, all the parameters are already wired into the driver. It remains for the user to connect devices ( for example, ours ) to add two lines to the config file: the device model and its address.
• We added support for pulse counters to the driver of digital inputs and outputs. Now you can connect inexpensive metering devices directly to the digital inputs of Wiren Board. The user must specify the type of meter (water, gas, electricity), a constant (written on the meter), and this is enough to watch liters or watts in the web interface.
• ordinary digital signals are also supported: connecting reed switches, motion sensors, etc. Reaction to events is now instantaneous thanks to the use of interrupts.
• Improved driver analog inputs. Now it supports direct measurement of resistance, which allows you to connect resistive sensors.
• With the help of the user community, the support of Oregon weather sensors has improved in the 433 MHz radio module driver, new devices and new commands for nooLite are supported.

In beta testing (testers are invited):

• Z-wave support. Z-wave is supported by USB sticks from z-wave.me, using their certified core. Devices are integrated into our standard infrastructure.
• SmartBus G4 and HDL driver. These are quite expensive wired home automation systems. Wiren Board 4 allows devices of these standards to be used in conjunction with cheaper projects where possible.

Cloud Wiren Board Cloud

The local web interface is good, but very often you need access via the Internet. To do this, we made a cloudy web interface that runs on our servers.

With the server, the Wiren Board controllers exchange only data, so everything works quickly and even over GPRS.

Additionally, you can connect several controllers to one interface, which for example allows you to make “mini-SCADA” systems for dispatching.

See in action here: demo.contactless.ru .

Developer Discount

We made a 20% discount on samples of all our production devices for developers. The discount applies to 1 copy of each device for individuals.

All the details are on the website and in the documentation center .

We welcome comments!