[Ovmsdev] Getting started

[Craig Leres]

Although experienced with J1850/Class 2, ovms is completely new to me. I 
have a friend with a V1 module in his roadster and it's great that the 
V3 module is finally out! I've figured out a fair amount on my own but 
it's probably time for me to start asking questions (and providing some 
feedback).

I got my module up on the bench without too much trouble. The V2 and V3 
server config was confusing to me since I knew almost nothing. I think I 
had read that V2 was legacy and V3 was where new development effort was 
happening so I thought that's what I wanted. But I didn't find much info 
on io.adafruit.com vs. ovms so I ended up configuring the V2 server for 
starters.

My canbus car is a second generation CTS-V. Once I plugged that in I 
could see my car with the iphone app. But the app didn't show much (I 
completely understand that most work so far as been on plugin vehicles). 
Once I turned the car on the battery percentage starting showing how 
full my gas tank was. I'm still a bit confused about how GPS works. I 
was expecting it to use the GPS periodically but what I've found is if I 
don't turn on the GPS at startup, I never see location info even when 
I'm driving. And if I enable GPS at startup, it seems to always be on 
even when the car is not. Maybe this is because my car isn't supported 
and the module doesn't know when it's running? I also found that trying 
to press any of the homelink options crashes the iphone app.

Initially I could not get ssh to work. This wasn't surprising since my 
FreeBSD desktop runs openssh 7.7p1 and I know there is a push to disable 
or even remove less secure and insecure crypto. But after joining the 
ovmsdev list the solution was revealed (create a Host block with 
"Ciphers aes128-cbc") so that is working for me now.

I like the way ssh.keys work (mapping the remote username) but I use 
hard tokens with ssh it sure would be nice if you could configure more 
than one ssh key. When learning about how ssh works I was using the 
google doc (15Mar18) and it says when you login you start in non-secure 
mode. I find ssh always puts me in secure mode.

The section about SD cards in the google doc is empty; I made 
assumptions and got a couple class 10 64G cards. I don't know if this is 
a good size or way to big to be useful.

Today I brought up a mqtt server (mosquitto). In verbose mode I can see 
my v3 module posting things to it but I don't know what tools I can use 
with my server.

I'd like to get a build environment up. The only info I could find was:

 
https://github.com/openvehicles/Open-Vehicle-Monitoring-System/blob/master/docs/OVMS_Development.pdf

which is geared towards v2 (which I saw is pic based). What do I need to 
be able to build for v3? I normally work/play on FreeBSD but I have an 
ubuntu system handy for when I need it.

I noticed lists.openvehicles.com uses http; if I try to force https I 
end up on a different website. Looks like apache is in use; I have a lot 
of experience with apache and lets encrypt ssl certs and would be happy 
to share the setup I use.

I'm also wondering about https support for the ovms module itself. Is 
that on the roadmap? I know the esp32 can do it; I have done a *lot* 
with atmega arduino clones but have recently started using esp8266 and 
esp32 modules because I can network them (and with https).

		Craig