What may looks like a competitor, but isn't, Souliss

[plinioseniore]

Hi,

I'm new in this nice community. I'm not a MySensor users, rather I'm involved into another open-source Arduino based project around the Smarthome and IoT worlds, of course I'm not here to cross-promote the project where I'm in.

MySensors and Souliss are similar and different at same time, and is a regret that we didn't merge our project at a earlier stage. I'm here to follow discussion (this is a really big community) and keep good ideas, then hopefully there could be a common point between our projects.

Keep up the good work,
Dario.

[islou]

I'm surprised nobody else has replied to this (have been floating around for a while but battling with myself to finish PhD thesis and not tinker!!) but this pushed me to sign up and post...

I wanted to say, I am just a user of both platforms and am continuing to develop nodes for both, I hope to post up the details of everything customised and built and add whatever little I can to this amazing community. Of course the great enabler in the middle for me is openHAB (a 3rd great project and community!!) but I second all of the OPs comments...

In hope of starting a little discussion instead of just needlessly bumping, I would add that from my perspective, souliss's strengths lie more on the Ethernet side where as my sensors has got the radio management to a T .

Either way a massive thanks to both communities so far!

[plinioseniore]

Hi,

as stated before is really a regret that these project haven't merged at the begin where there were no much differences.

Actually MySensor and Souliss are quite different in the approach even if they share a common goal. From what I've learned about MySensor, the network architecture supported in Souliss are far more complex and flexible (including multiple RS485 and wireless) but this comes at a price of a more complex interaction, so that building a binding becomes more complex for Souliss rather than MySensors.

As example, with MySensor you cannot get more than one Ethernet/WiFi nodes and all the others must be RF ones (correct me if I'm wrong!) and this is in contrast with Souliss that allow as many node type as you need, including RF and others.

A big plus of MySensor is the community, is huge and big compared to our one, and likely the support documentation is better and gives people a way to get started easier.

Regards,
Dario.

[scalz]

hi.
yes I agree with you @plinioseniore. For example, when I started to have interest in homeautomation, I looked at your lib. And I hesitated for a long time between Mysensors and yours. and for the reasons you said i have choosen Mysensors. Others reason are:

• I am a jeedom user (very great controller I must say), and there was no plugin for souliss. and not yet.
• I prefer nodebb, more friendly I think, lol
• for security reason (maybe I am too paranoid), I prefer to have usb GW and Mhz radio than too much ethernet wifi. but you are right, your lib handle lots of protocol like rs485...it is very cool
  Is your ethernet network secured? like ssl or token/authentication thing...I am not expert, but I think this is something lacking in lots of iot opensource libs. Hopefully, esp8266 team is working on this I think (for arduino)

For the moment, I plan to use mysensors for radios, and for wifi, maybe a rest api with ssl. or find a way to have wifi ssl node in Mysensors...and maybe rs485 in future, as someone have done a mysensors class too..

You have done a great work (overall concept and code), bravo Each time I see good code and architecture I am admirative.
btw @Hek and core team have done a big job on the code too, now, I think, there will be more options, I hope !

my 2cents user opinion

[hek]

@plinioseniore

Good to hear from you. Long time since we spoke.

I've been busy working on a big refactoring of the core which will make it easier to configure things directly from sketch and this change also saves the user from a lot of boilerplate stuff.

This change also makes it easier to switch protocol and transports (in both directions) and prepares things for more fun things.

BTW: A community member recently did a rs485 transport layer
https://github.com/leodesigner/mysensors-serial-transport

Cheers

[plinioseniore]

@hek nice see RS485 support in MySensor, is it a Gateway to RS485 nodes or you can handle multiple wireless and RS485 at same time with one Gateway?

Just seen the new configuration, looks same approach that we use in Souliss. Isn't C best practice, but have the configuration in the sketch is a great plus. When a year ago we switches to this, we got a lot of more people able to get started in few time without troubles.

[plinioseniore]

@scalz more option is always better

[hek]

It's Gateway<->RS485 only.

[plinioseniore]

What about security mentioned by @scalz? I rember that I've read something about, but was based on an external IC to compute encryption and decryption.

In a peer-to-peer network most of the chyper technique are vane, so their a potential risk, but this may be real only if things scale to a really huge number of users, that's unlikely. In Souliss we have introduced a lock-down that protect people that use port-forwarding to be vulnerable from external access, but this has never really be an issue at this time.

[scalz]

@plinioseniore : thx, it is good to know. and you are right about potential risk. I am not a network expert, so what I said are much more noob things
for my point of view, the best network would be a mix in terms of features between mysensors lib and souliss. all these features in one lib could be incredible but not easy task, and lot of dev I think. but with the time things change, I can't wait to see...
one other thing I have never checked, just for curiosity, is the program memory/ram footprint mysensors vs souliss. just for fun. I dont know..

@hek : I can't wait to see your gateway refactoring . maybe I will look at it when I will have some time. curious..

[plinioseniore]

Souliss footprints vary on the hardware and the number of interfaces that the gateway has, generally a Gateway fits in 1, 1.5 KBytes of RAM it depends on enabled features. There are also features (like data persistence) that need more than 2 KBytes.

[islou]

@scalz I did the same, trying to decide between the two!

It is true, I had mysensors working and a smile on my face within 20 mins of finding the website, including building the hardware on breadboard, so great!!

With Souliss I am still reading and learning! Only have simple implementations so far. One thing I do like is the wireless local logic abilities, like you say, distributed gateways.

I suppose with everything considered you are correct, souliss is far more involved a platform, in general but also from the end user side. I also find on the nodes I have experimented with, it is more memory intensive, but that might be my terrible implementation !!

Either way, these platforms are just amazing in their own rights, I dreamed of exactly what they offer a few years back and my studies and research always got in the way, but now its time to play! As @scalz says, I really admire what both developments have produced, just great engineering !!