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What are the options to find IOT devices on local network?

For example, I have an IOT device, an Air Conditioner which is connected to local network by wifi. I want to send instructions to it from smartphone which is connected to the same network from App. How can this be achieved? What are my options?

In my case it is esp8266 node that automatically connects to local network.

Nikhil Shetye
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  • is the iot device connect over wifi or bLE? – Ramz Nov 15 '16 at 08:03
  • if your device connected over wifi go through mqtt http://mqtt.org/ and Alljoyn Service https://allseenalliance.org/alliance/faq – Ramz Nov 15 '16 at 08:09
  • the raspberry will trigger the aircon, and app will trigger raspberry. through a simple PHP server, or what ever you like – zerocool Nov 15 '16 at 08:11
  • Before the word "IoT" was around there were still several options. You could set up a UDP server on the device that responds to broadcasts with the info you want to share . – leetibbett Nov 16 '16 at 11:28
  • @Ramz... its connected to wifi... I am using esp8266 mcu which is configured to connect to local network... – Nikhil Shetye Nov 17 '16 at 12:13

1 Answers1

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Here are scenarios :

  1. Use static IP : Assign static IPs to your devices which will be connected with SmartPhone.

  2. Use SSDP: SSDP is a protocol that multicast discovery packages to find related devices on network. Here is example.

  3. Use a coordinator : Assign a coordinator device like raspberry and assign it an Static IP. So all your request gonna be made via this coordinator. You need to run a server to handle connections in the coordinator.

If you want to use internet access, here is fourth possibility:

  1. Use a host on cloud/internet: Use a host or a cloud instance as communicator and bridge the app and the device to the host via WebSocket or RESTFul servers. You gonna use your host IP for all request and the server gonna handle connections.
cagdas
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  • Using Static Ip and coordinator is not possible and also not cloud so I have been trying to implement SSDP... but I have been having difficulty in finding any good content on it explaining me how it works. Wikipedia has not been very helpful.because I have to implement it from scratch. – Nikhil Shetye Nov 17 '16 at 12:16
  • So what about the Arduino example ? – cagdas Nov 17 '16 at 12:17
  • Sorry missed on that – Nikhil Shetye Nov 17 '16 at 12:29
  • The code is not meant for NODEMCU , so I am again in need of specification of SSDP.So I tried to understand this https://github.com/pastukhov/nodemcu-ssdp , it tries to notify twice and then stops , I was unable to understand how SSDP exactly works, what are function of Notify and MSearch etc. Please direct me to some content. – Nikhil Shetye Nov 17 '16 at 16:29
  • Check some brief explanations about ssdp from here : https://github.com/universAAL/middleware/wiki/Discovery-protocol-SSDP – cagdas Nov 18 '16 at 03:49
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    Notify is the action for a device to multicast its presence to the network. M-search is the action for collecting these notified device info. – cagdas Nov 18 '16 at 04:05