lattice-watering

Essentally Automation for Watering Your Plants

Folder Hierarchy

br: Border router firmware.
doc: Documents we created during the software project.
front: The frontend is a website from which one can see statistics on each plant and control the pumps.
fw: Firmware for the clients that utilize sensory to water the plants.
man: Manuals for the devices we use.
misc: Mischief that was created during development. You can look at it for the giggles.
proxy: A DTLS proxy based on tinydtls written in Rust.
psk: PSK key used, remember to regenerate this once in a while.

To replicate our project, you will need to follow the steps of the HWSETUP.md file to first create a border router and at least one node board. Then, you will want to flash both of these with the firmwares we provided. Note that you need RIOT and the appropriate tools for your platform. We also use clang-format, just and some other utilities. Especially, you need to clone RIOT in a folder above this one. So you would do:

$ git clone https://github.com/valentinpi/lattice-watering
$ git clone https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT

Please look into flashing a border router, br, first, as the explanations there are very similar to fw (node firmware). Also, you will need to build the proxy that is used for translating DTLS traffic with Rust. We recommend rustup to install rustc nightly, cargo and just. You will also want to create new PSK keys, you can do that by running:

$ just gen_psk

just is a small program that is similar to make, but not a build tool, but a script runner. Look into the justfile for the commands we have written.

General Conventions

IPv6 only.
UDP/CoAP for the communication with the IoT devices.
The CoAP communication is stateless only.

C Coding Conventions

Use the included clang-format file. For VS Code see xaver.clang-format.
Use cppcheck for static code checking. For VS Code see QiuMingGe.cpp-check-lint.
Use the integer types inttypes.h provides.
Buffers are to be zeroed out asap.
Use #pragma once.
Use snake_case.
Use " instead of ' for raw strings.

JS Coding Conventions

Use use strict in all scripts.
Use snake_case.
Always use let instead of var.

Some Design Decisions

CoAP instead of MQTT-SN due to several factors. For one, MQTT-SN loss close to the host would be significantly larger following [1] and performance is rather similar [1], [2]. This is due to MQTT-SN sending out retransmissions much more uncoordinated, to put it shortly. The number of hops is also much larger, leading to higher power consumption. Also, RIOT offers DTLS encryption via GCOAPS, which is quite handy and lowers application complexity, whilst MQTT-SN is not encrypted. Whilst we can encrypt the payload or setup a DTLS socket to do MQTT-SN over, the former would still be a nonstandard solution and we tried to go for open standards, and the latter would induce more code complexity. Also, since the group is more familiar with HTTP-similar solutions, we did not go with ICN protocols such as NDN or its variation HoPP.
nanocbor for commands as it has very low footprint and is non-proprietary.
We wanted to use wolfssl since it uses a GNU license, but it is not supported by gnrc_dtls, so we use tinydtls.
The SAMR21-XPRO boards have no HW RNG, so we use a PRNG. We went with prng_sha256prng, since it might provide better security than prng_sha1prng at a possibly slightly higher computational cost. Security in IoT should not be overlooked.
We do not use the LED nor an additional HDC1000 sensor due to energy usage.
We use SQLite as it suffices for our use case. We do not need a multi-user highly concurrent database, only if we were to attach several thousand sensors, and even then: Every five seconds the packets are sent, and the host is more than strong enough to handle such a load, not even speaking of the possible package loss in the meantime.
To make authentication easy, we use PSKs (Pre-Shared Secrets) to build DTLS connections, such that only peers who have the same secret can communicate with one another. In our threat model, we assume that no board will be compromised. Sadly, the tinydtls RIOT implementation apprently only supports 16 byte large keys and ECC support is currently lacking, see RIOT-OS/RIOT#18292.
Due to very poor support of DTLS in node.js at the time, we implemented our own DTLS proxy in RIOT native. This was needed as the implementations and proxies we found were not working, as well as OpenSSL, and writing an OpenSSL proxy would have taken too much time.

Starting the System

To start the system, the proxy software and the ethos interface have to be started, and the br and fw firmwares have to be flashed onto the boards.

Possible Future Enhancements

Use TypeScript instead of JavaScript in the frontend.
The TinyDTLS library comes with a weak PRNG, replace it with a tough one.
Improve the Rust proxy server. A possible larger project could be to build a very good and easy to use DTLS library with support for multiple platforms such as Node JS, since no library currently really accomplishes that. Handle tinydtls events. Currently, the proxy does not discard connected devices, meaning that the sessions vector will have run out of space at some point. This was made so due to time constraints. Regular restarts could fix this issue in practical. The proxy should be made asynchronous aswell.
The website does not have a very modern look, which is okay, but it is not responsive aswell.
ISSUE: The chart in the website sometimes stops refreshing, especially when toggling the pump.
ISSUE: The Jobs and the DB can become out of sync, leading to strange toggling cycles. If you shut down the frontend during a watering schedule, you should consider deleting the database.
ISSUE: The thresholding and scheduling mechanisms will conflict if used simultaneously. Fix that.

Some Sources

[1] https://github.com/5G-I3/Impact-Industrial-IoT-2020 (last access: 16.07.2022 14:40)

[2] "MQTT-SN, CoAP, and RTP in wireless IoT real-time communications", "Herrero, Rolando", 2022, Springer, DOI: 10.1007/s00530-020-00674-5

[3] front/public/img/jasmine_flower.png: https://st3.depositphotos.com/1768926/19425/v/450/depositphotos_194256716-stock-illustration-jasmine-flower-icon-logo-template.jpg (last access: 15.07.2022 21:45, we do not use the picture commercially)