Anyone using HomePlugAV Open Powerline networking? Anyone want to help with a binding?

Add-ons Bindings
1

I have a powerline network. It’s a mix of TP-Link and Tenda devices - they’re all compatible as they use the same HomePlugAV protocols.

I’d like to monitor the health of the network from OpenHab. My OpenHab is running on a Pi using Openhabian. There are open-source utils for reporting on the network - here’s example output:

 NID EB:F3:40:AC:E5:43:09 SNID 004
 CCO TEI 002 MAC C1:24:E9:67:76:A3 BDA B8:27:EB:79:47:8F
 STA TEI 003 MAC 55:0F:F6:0E:AA:72 BDA 50:0F:F5:0E:AA:70 TX 030 RX 166
 STA TEI 015 MAC C0:25:EC:6B:5A:E3 BDA 00:18:DD:24:01:F2 TX 191 RX 160
 STA TEI 017 MAC 20:EF:52:9D:60:68 BDA 00:E0:4C:68:11:33 TX 139 RX 203

“CCO” is the powerline adapter that’s connected to my OpenHab server. “STA” are the other three devices, showing the TX and RX rates in Mb/s to and from the local adapter.

What I’d like is to be able to have a general “Powerline up” thing, and then autodiscovered things for each remote adapter showing the TX/RX rates.

I’ve never written a binding before - what’s the easiest intro? I’m a long-time C coder and have dabbled in other Java-like languages (but I’m no expert).

2

Hey Dave,
There are several ways to get information you interested in.

  1. Use shell scripts to call tools combined with exec binding and/or rules.
  2. Write binding which calls specific daemon which understands protocol (this is a case for 1wire binding)
  3. Write a “native” binding which understands protocol, this one will require openhab to make direct communication with hardware adapter.

Amount of work and maintenance cost is different depending on the method. Looking at adapters it seems they are able to turn signal back to standard ethernet. Have you tried to use ie. network binding to monitor foreign network nodes?
Anyhow looking closer at the wireshark homeplug protocol information looks like there is a dedicated kind of ethernet frame which ships complete information similar to what you posted.

Best,
Łukasz