Serialize and Send data from Simulink using Protocol Buffers - matlab

I'm not very familiar with Simulink but I have a model with hundreds of signals in it and I would like to stream or send these data asynchronously via UDP when the model is running. But I would like to serialize it first using Protocol Buffers.
Here is how I did it, I only added a few signals here and sent them via UDP:
I tried to add a code block before but didn't know how to add a .proto file and compile it there.

Related

How can I invoke UART_Receive_IT() automatically when I receive a data?

I am new to STM32 and freertos. I need to write a program to send and receive data from a module via UART port. I have to send(Transmit) a data to that module(for eg. M66). Then I would return to do some other tasks. once the M66 send a response to that, my seial-port-receive-function(HAL_UART_Receive_IT) has to be invoked and receive that response. How can I achieve this?
The way HAL_UART_Receive_IT works is that you configure it to receive specified amount of data into given buffer. You give it your buffer to which it'll read received data and number of bytes you want to receive. It then starts receiving data. Once exactly this amount of data is received, a callback function HAL_UART_RxCpltCallback gets called (from IRQ) where you can do whatever you want with this data, e.g. add it to some kind of queue for later processing in the task context.
If I was to express my experiences related to working with HAL's UART module is that it's not the greatest one for generic use where you don't know the amount of data you expect to receive in advance. In the case of M66 modem you mention, this will happen all the time.
To solve this you have two choices:
Simply don't use HAL functions at all in case of UART, other than the initialization functions. Implement your own UART interrupt handler (most of the code can be copied from handler in HAL) where upon receiving data you place received bytes in a receive byte queue handled in your RTOS task. In this task you implement protocol parsing. This is the approach I use personally.
If you really want to use HAL but also work with a module that sends varying amount of data, call HAL_UART_Receive_IT and specify that you want to receive 1 byte each time. This will work, but will be (potentially much) slower than the first approach. Assuming you'll later want to implement some tcp/ip communication (you mentioned M66 GPRS module) you probably don't want to do it this way.
You should try the following way.
Enable UARTX Rx interrupt in NVIC.
Set Interrupt priority.
Unmask Interrupt request in EXTI.
Then use USARTX Interrupt Handler Function Define in you Vector.
Whenever the data is received from USARTX this function get automatically called and you can copy data from USARTX Receive Data Register.
I would rather suggest another approach. You probably want to archive higher speeds (lets say 921600 bods) and the interrupt way is fat to slow for it.
You need to implement the DMA transmition with the data end detection features. Run your USART in the DMA mode in the circular mode. You will have two events to serve. The first one is the DMA end of thransmition interrupt (then you copy the data from the current tail pointer to the end of the buffer to avoid data override) and USART IDLE interrupt - this will detect the end of the receive.

Simulink UDP Send Callback

How can I access the callbacks for the "UDP Send" Block (from Instrument Control Toolbox) in Simulink?
I want to send UDP data as fast as it is available in Simulink. After a short amount of time running my Simulink model the Simulation stops as "an asynchronous write is already in progress".
I would like to send whenever the status of that block is '{idle}', however I haven't found a way to access this information.
I also tried to write the function myself in a matlab script within the Simulink model, but code generation is not supported for udp class.
As far as I know, the UDP Send block doesn't give you access to that.
However, you can use coder.extrinsic(function_name_1, ...) to build your own MATLAB block.

netlink connector sockets

I have worked with network programming before. But this is my first foray into netlink sockets.
I have chosen to study the 'connector' type of netlink sockets. As with any kernel component, it has a user counterpart as well. The linux kernel has a sample program called ucon.c which can be used to build userspace programs based on the aforementioned connector netlink sockets.
So here I wish to pin-point parts of the program that I want to confirm my understanding of and of parts of the program that I do not follow the logic of. Enough talking. Here we go. Please correct me wherever I go astray.
As far as I have understood, netlink sockets are a IPC method used to connect processes on the same machine and hence process ID is used as an identifier. And since netlink messages can be ideally multicast, another identifier that is needed by the netlink socket is the message group. All components that are connected to the same message group are in fact related. So while in case of IPv4, we use a sockaddr_in in place of the sockaddr, here we use a sockaddr_nl which contains the above mentioned identifiers.
Now, since we are not going to use the TCP/IP stack of the kernel, in case of netlink messages, netlink packets can be considered to be raw (please correct me here if I am wrong). Hence the only encapsulation that the netlink packet goes through is the netlink message header defined as nlmsghdr.
Now coming on to our program ucon, main() first creates a NETLINK family socket with the connector protocol. Then it fills up the aforementioned netlink socketaddress structure with the relevant information. In order to be a little experimental here, I have added an entry in the connector.h file. Now here comes my first question.
A connector message has a certain type defined in connector.h. Now this connector message structure is something that is completely internal to netlink right? As in, as far as netlink is concerned, this is all but payload. Right?
Moving on, what exactly does the nl-group field mean within the netlink message header structure? The definition does not really contain an element of this name. So are we using overlay techniques to fill certain fields of the netlink message header? And if so, what exactly is the correspondence? I cannot seem to find it anywhere.
So after binding the socket address to the socket, it is sending 10,000 unique pieces of connector based data, which as far as netlink is concerned, is pure payload. But what is strange as far as these messages are concerned is, that all of them seem to have the same sequence number.
Moving on, we find ourselves in the netlink_send subroutine to send these packets via the socket that we are bound to above. This subroutine uses a variety of netlink helper macros to manipulate the data to send. As we say above, the main() function sends 10,000 pieces of data, each of whom is zero-length and requires no acknowledgement, since the ack field is 0 (please correct me if I am wrong here). So each 'packet' is nothing but a connector message header without anything in it. Right?
Now what is surprising is that the netlink_Send function uses the same sequence number as the main() since it is a global variable. However, after the post increment in main(), it is now '1'. So basically our netlink talk is starting with a sequence number of '1'. Is that fine?
Looking into some of the helper macros defined in linux/netlink.h, I will try to summarize my understanding of the ones that are directly or indirectly being used in this program.
#define NLMSG_LENGTH(len) ((len)+NLMSG_ALIGN(NLMSG_HDRLEN))
So this macro will first align the netlink message header length and then add the payload length to it. For our case the netlink payload is a connector header without any payload of its own.
In our case, this micro is used like so
nlh->nlmsg_len = NLMSG_LENGTH(size - sizeof(*nlh));
Here, what I do not understand is the actual payload of the netlink message. In the above case, it is the size of the connector message header (since the connector message itself contains no payload of its own) minus the pointer (which is pointing to the first byte of the netlink message and thereby the netlink message header). And this pointer is (like any other pointer variable) equal to the machine word size which in my case is 4 bytes. Why are we substracting this from the connector message header?
After that, we send the message over this netlink socket just like any other IPv4 socket. hope to hear from you fellows out there with regards to the above mentioned questions. Including some sentences before the actual quesion would help as my post is rather long. But I hope it would be useful to people more than just myself.
Regards.

Lua sockets - Asynchronous Events

In current lua sockets implementation, I see that we have to install a timer that calls back periodically so that we check in a non blocking API to see if we have received anything.
This is all good and well however in UDP case, if the sender has a lot of info being sent, do we risk loosing the data. Say another device sends a 2MB photo via UDP and we check socket receive every 100msec. At 2MBps, the underlying system must store 200Kbits before our call queries the underlying TCP stack.
Is there a way to get an event fired when we receive the data on the particular socket instead of the polling we have to do now?
There are a various ways of handling this issue; which one you will select depends on how much work you want to do.*
But first, you should clarify (to yourself) whether you are dealing with UDP or TCP; there is no "underlying TCP stack" for UDP sockets. Also, UDP is the wrong protocol to use for sending whole data such as a text, or a photo; it is an unreliable protocol so you aren't guaranteed to receive every packet, unless you're using a managed socket library (such as ENet).
Lua51/LuaJIT + LuaSocket
Polling is the only method.
Blocking: call socket.select with no time argument and wait for the socket to be readable.
Non-blocking: call socket.select with a timeout argument of 0, and use sock:settimeout(0) on the socket you're reading from.
Then simply call these repeatedly.
I would suggest using a coroutine scheduler for the non-blocking version, to allow other parts of the program to continue executing without causing too much delay.
Lua51/LuaJIT + LuaSocket + Lua Lanes (Recommended)
Same as the above method, but the socket exists in another lane (a lightweight Lua state in another thread) made using Lua Lanes (latest source). This allows you to instantly read the data from the socket and into a buffer. Then, you use a linda to send the data to the main thread for processing.
This is probably the best solution to your problem.
I've made a simple example of this, available here. It relies on Lua Lanes 3.4.0 (GitHub repo) and a patched LuaSocket 2.0.2 (source, patch, blog post re' patch)
The results are promising, though you should definitely refactor my example code if you derive from it.
LuaJIT + OS-specific sockets
If you're a little masochistic, you can try implementing a socket library from scratch. LuaJIT's FFI library makes this possible from pure Lua. Lua Lanes would be useful for this as well.
For Windows, I suggest taking a look at William Adam's blog. He's had some very interesting adventures with LuaJIT and Windows development. As for Linux and the rest, look at tutorials for C or the source of LuaSocket and translate them to LuaJIT FFI operations.
(LuaJIT supports callbacks if the API requires it; however, there is a signficant performance cost compared to polling from Lua to C.)
LuaJIT + ENet
ENet is a great library. It provides the perfect mix between TCP and UDP: reliable when desired, unreliable otherwise. It also abstracts operating system specific details, much like LuaSocket does. You can use the Lua API to bind it, or directly access it via LuaJIT's FFI (recommended).
* Pun unintentional.
I use lua-ev https://github.com/brimworks/lua-ev for all IO-multiplexing stuff.
It is very easy to use fits into Lua (and its function) like a charm. It is either select/poll/epoll or kqueue based and performs very good too.
local ev = require'ev'
local loop = ev.Loop.default
local udp_sock -- your udp socket instance
udp_sock:settimeout(0) -- make non blocking
local udp_receive_io = ev.IO.new(function(io,loop)
local chunk,err = udp_sock:receive(4096)
if chunk and not err then
-- process data
end
end,udp_sock:getfd(),ev.READ)
udp_receive_io:start(loop)
loop:loop() -- blocks forever
In my opinion Lua+luasocket+lua-ev is just a dream team for building efficient and robust networking applications (for embedded devices/environments). There are more powerful tools out there! But if your resources are limited, Lua is a good choice!
Lua is inherently single-threaded; there is no such thing as an "event". There is no way to interrupt executing Lua code. So while you could rig something up that looked like an event, you'd only ever get one if you called a function that polled which events were available.
Generally, if you're trying to use Lua for this kind of low-level work, you're using the wrong tool. You should be using C or something to access this sort of data, then pass it along to Lua when it's ready.
You are probably using a non-blocking select() to "poll" sockets for any new data available. Luasocket doesn't provide any other interface to see if there is new data available (as far as I know), but if you are concerned that it's taking too much time when you are doing this 10 times per second, consider writing a simplified version that only checks one socket you need and avoids creating and throwing away Lua tables. If that's not an option, consider passing nil to select() instead of {} for those lists you don't need to read and pass static tables instead of temporary ones:
local rset = {socket}
... later
...select(rset, nil, 0)
instead of
...select({socket}, {}, 0)

How can I get a callback when there is some data to read on a boost.asio stream without reading it into a buffer?

It seems that since boost 1.40.0 there has been a change to the way that the the async_read_some() call works.
Previously, you could pass in a null_buffer and you would get a callback when there was data to read, but without the framework reading the data into any buffer (because there wasn't one!). This basically allowed you to write code that acted like a select() call, where you would be told when your socket had some data on it.
In the new code the behaviour has been changed to work in the following way:
If the total size of all buffers in the sequence mb is 0, the asynchronous read operation shall complete immediately and pass 0 as the argument to the handler that specifies the number of bytes read.
This means that my old (and incidentally, the method shown in this official example) way of detecting data on the socket no longer works. The problem for me is that I need a way detecting this because I've layered my own streaming classes on-top of the asio socket streams and as such, I cannot just read data off the sockets that my streams will expect to be there. The only workaround I can think of right now is to read a single byte, store it and when my stream classes then request some bytes, return that byte if one is set: not pretty.
Does anyone know of a better way to implement this kind of behaviour under the latest boost.asio code?
My quick test with an official example with boost-1.41 works... So I think it still should work (if you use null_buffers)