Notes On Software on Rusty Eddy

Exposing a Go App as Claude MCP Tools

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets Claude call external tools defined by your application. Instead of pasting data into a chat window or writing one-off scripts to query your system, you define tools with typed schemas, start an MCP server, and Claude can call them directly — in Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or any MCP-compatible client.

The Trader project uses this to expose its Forex trading engine as Claude tools: query your OANDA account, review open trades, run a backtest against historical data, and — when explicitly enabled — place or close orders.

Adafruit Soil Moisture Sensor Notes for IoT Projects

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Adafruit Soil Moisture Sensor Notes for IoT Projects

Notes on using the Adafruit STEMMA soil moisture sensor after unreliable results from cheap capacitive sensors in an ESP32 garden project.

https://github.com/rustyeddy/iotesp

Cheap capacitive soil moisture sensors are attractive for garden automation because they are inexpensive and easy to find. In practice, the ones I tried were inconsistent enough that they became a distraction from the larger system design — and that is the whole point of this note. When the sensor is one small part of a larger system (collection stations, an edge gateway, MQTT data flow, REST APIs, and a dashboard), a slightly more expensive sensor that behaves predictably is cheaper than spending days debugging noisy readings.

Soil Moisture Sensors for IoT Garden Projects

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Practical notes on soil moisture sensor reliability, calibration, protection, and sensor choice for a self-watering garden project.

Using Go timers for MQTT testing

Mon, 02 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This article uses a Go timer and the Go select statement to test our MQTT publish and subscribe in a single simple test statement. A quick note on the go testing package: it is much like the JUnit where tests using a particular naming convention TestXXX(t *testing.T) {} will be run automatically with easy to reports having been generated.

The Problem

The following code snippet is directly from the IoTe edge gateway project. One of the primary features of IoTe is the ability to send and receive MQTT messages.

How to build a private WIFI network for your WebApp

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I work with physical computing or devices that have rather sophisticated software that needs to be configured, monitored and controlled.

Building a Private Wifi

Here is the situation, I just plugged a white box into the wall and it has a steady green light. I can see two other lights, one of which is red. The other two lights are off.

This device is pretty cool, it will control the lights in my garage, I have a well lit garage. But I need to configure this thing to set up lighting schedules, basically synchronize with daylight.

Golang timers to remove stale sensor stations

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This articles introduces Go (Golang) Timers as the mechanism the the IoTa gateway uses to identify stale IoT stations. Modifying the Station with with a new Go timestamp field will allow IoTe to determine how long it has been since the last time it has heard from a given Station.

If the last refresh time for a particular station has been longer than the timeout period the Station will be marked as stale.

Why Choose the Go programming Language for your Project?

Sun, 22 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Go is simple

Go is easy to learn to program with and it is free! Go is much easier to maintain and deploy than Java.

Go does not have weird virtual environments of Python or npm, gulp, grunt, yarn, webpack (what’s next?) convuluted and complex build environments.

Go is Fast

It smokes most other languages, except the grand mother of Unix programming C. The Go programming language is almost as fast (performant geeky folks like to say) as C.

Red Eye Video Server

Fri, 24 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Red Eye project is a service definition rapper around inexpensive cameras attached to inexpesive micro-controllers that take pretty good video.

The video streams are built using the GStreamer library. The camera native capabilities are used to extract as high quailty, realtime images possible.

The video streams will be consumed by one or more sinks, including but not limited to Files, cloud storage, High Def Display and Computer Vision libraries.

Skid Steering

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Skid steering basics

Based on fixed direction wheels[1] or tracks
There are two groups or sides of wheels: left and right
All wheels in a group MUST always point in the same direction
All wheels in a group MUST always rotate at the same rate
Direction is determined by the speed of the two wheel groups
- To move straight all motors rotate at the same rate
- Forward and Reverse are determined by positive and negative values
- Turning is achieved by varying the throttle on the right and left

Example

The Skidder class has the following API, as you can see all of the movements we desire can be accomplished with a single API call skidder.set_throttle(left_throttle, right_throttle), does not get much simpler than this!

Raspberry Pi Motor Control Software

Tue, 14 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This software adds a Skid Steer motor control software to the Raspberry Pi Device Server device server. RPID adds motor controls accessible via both MQTT and REST APIs, as well as directly with the Skidder python library.

MQTT For Controllor Communication

Fri, 03 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The MQTT message bus is a simple but critical element of our MBR software design. MQTT provides what is known as a publish/suscribe or pubsub communications model. This model of machine to machine communication has some attractive benefits for realtime driving algorithms that we will discuss in this post.

Streaming Video is Complicated

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I need to stream live video from a moving vehical with a connected camera and a possibly connected wifi.

Live High Resolution Video

Video will stream from the vehicle to be picked up by video consumers and processed as required. Examples of consumers are Live Video Display on our (Webapp), OpenCV for vision algoritms.

High Demand For Low Resolution

It turns out that computer vision alogrithms typically run quite a bit faster on lower resolution images, the additional information from these hi-res images can slow down the type of algorithms we are interested in by many factors.

Streaming Video Tools

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The grandparents of streaming video, and snapshots, read, writing and transcoding video and single frame images are ffmpeg, vlc and gstreamer.

Other platforms, such as the wildly cool and inexpensive Raspberry Pi and attached CSI Camera (Raspberry Pi Camera) have thier own set of utilities: like raspivid. Or the NVidia Nano with it’s gst-streamer plugins and nvgst-capture/nvgst-playback utilies.

These notes were originally written in March 2019

GStreamer Complex, Flexible, Future Proof

GStreamer really complex pipelines but insanely flexible.

TLV the Type Length Vector Protocol

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

TLV is a very simple communication protocol that can be used to send messages around a complex, distributed system.

Streaming Live Video on a Local Lan Vs. Internet

Sun, 23 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

differences in local vs. internet and streaming video
live stream vs. video on demand
what does real time mean?
what to do with late packets?
UDP vs. TCP in the local network
RTP and UDP
RTP and RTCP
RTP and RTSP
RTP and Multicast
Tools used

RTSP is a good option for streaming video in a local setup up, where minimal delay is the highest priority. However, RTSP does not typically do very well over the Internet due to the nature of RTP/UDP.

Inexpensive Motor Controllers for Arduino and Raspberry Pi

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I prefer to use an Arduino with a Motor Controller over say a Raspberry Pi with a motor-controller. I believe the Arudino has better support for dedicated Real-time software vs. the Raspberry Pi and as a superior platform for general computing including running Control Software. This is how we do it on the West side …

Control System Design

Sat, 05 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Early in the process of building the first set of mobile robots I discovered that I was not going to settle on a single micro controller.

The first two obvious choices being the Arduino or Raspberry Pi, for which I tried both with a modest level of success. I quickly realized that I would not be providing my sole focus on either platform, neither was sufficient for my grand plans for a number of reasons.

IP Multicast the basics

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

IP Multicast addresses

The typical IP addresses used by computers networking today are known as unicast addresses, meaning that every unicast address as a single (physical or logical) end point.

Most all computer networking is point to point between two specific IP addresses, you name it: web browsing, email exchange, transfer files and so much more.

However, there are other more specific forms on communication available and occasionally used: Broadcast and Multicast.