Wi-Fi OS X & Android P2P - android

I've been searching for a long time with no luck.
I'm trying to get a Mac OS X application to communicate with an Android application. Nothing more complicated than a chat client type application where text is typed in Android and sent to OS X (maybe via Cocoa or even a Java app).
I'm lost how to accomplish a Wi-Fi based communication between the two. I looked into Bluetooth first, but it seemed way over my head on the OS X side. Wi-Fi I assumed would be easier to implement.
Any guidance is much appreciated.

So you want your android to communicate with your Mac , there are many ways to do it.
1- With Internet- Queueing mechanism/DB mechanism
Your android could connect to SQS #AWS and write messages to the queue. You could write code in any language on OS X that reads off the queue and returns the string
Similar implementation can be done with a database- think orchestrate.io
2-Without internet
Assuming you've setup an ad-hoc connection between your mac and your android. You could simply open a socket and send and receive data on them. It's pretty straight-forward. Your Mac will run a TCP client and show the stream and print data out as necessary.

Related

Multithreaded Server via Arduino

Socket programming question here.
My interface comprises of an Android device(client), A wireless module hosting an access point, and an Arduino Uno(server).
My Android client class works when 1 user connects and sends commands to my Arduino server class.
I want to make my program friendly to many users at the same time. My server will only read in values from 1 connected client at a time.
After some research I've found that Arduino does not allow multithreading naturally, which is why i've decided to look into a number of libraries.
The Arduino library that I've decided to use for this specific issue is protothreads. Unfortunately, i've been unable to find any examples of creating a server with Arduino to accept a client's commands. Furthermore I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to make this library work in my favor.
Now for my question,
How exactly can I allow my Arduino server to constantly listen for
incoming messages from more than 1 client device?
Or is there something I can do on the client side that would make this communication possible?
Could you get away with accepting the socket responding and the closing it. Similar to a web page. As not to have multiple sockets open at once. Note uno only has 2k of ram flash goes quick. By one and close each stands alone and naturaly allow many different connections. Just one at a time.

find all devices in a network

In my local network there are several devices (running linux, c++) and an Android Smartphone.
Now I want to find and display all devices in the network on the Android Smartphone. Later i want to pair the android smart phone with the device for communication.
What's a good way to implement this?
My first ideas are:
sending a udp broadcast from the android smartphone, and handle these requests on each device and return a udp packet with more informations about the device.
or
When a device is active it periodically sends heartbeats as broadcast which the android smartphone can detect.
i also read about upnp, but i think this is kinda overkill.
Can you give me any hints how to implement this kind of task?
ty
You may want to have a look at nmap. It is a network scanner that can look through the network and find devices on it. Parse the output from it and display on the phone.

Getting started with Bluetooth development for Android: Suggestions for test application

I have a task to integrate a Bluetooth device into my application. Now my requirement is very specific. The device has a specific communication protocol which relies on certain ACKs but I figured it would make my development much easier if there was a program that let me test communication with the device.
I was wondering if there was a program for Linux, or perhaps a simple Android program which let me communicate with any Bluetooth device with a series of pings using data I enter and simply log the responses.
EDIT: I might not have been clear enough in my question.
I have a scale that I need to integrate into my application, and the scale has a protocol similar to this:
Get a specific byte string from device
Transfer data
Transfer packet for disconnection
Receive acknowledgement for disconnect packet
Disconnect
Now when I have to issue a POST request from my application, I usually build a test script online so I can test if the POST works properly.
I was wondering if there was something similar I could do with the device.
Thanks
Your question is not clear enough. To communicate with a BT device, you need to know what profile your device supports. Depending on that, you can find a way in Android or Linux or windows to communicate with the device.
The simplest way is to open an RFCOMM channel from android/PC and transfer data to and from the device. For this the device has to support the serial port profile (SPP). If you want to do this in Android, look for the BluetoothChat example from google.
If you want to use a PC/mac/linux look at the Bluez python module. It's really simple to use. There are plenty of other options too..
I was looking for something like SENA BTerm. It lets me connect to any device and send whatever data I wish.
It is an extremely useful tool for testing my code.
http://www.sena.com/download/manual_bterm/overview.html is where you can find it.

(Android, iOS, Windows, Linux) Server Polling Vs Push vs Implement Server

I'm building a multi-OS mirroring system which I would like to implement using a hybrid client-server and p2p communication method (at least that's the best way I have of describing it).
My issue is that at some point I have a central server (appengine, so there are limitations to what I could do because of time and networking capability constraints) that would need to get a message to a host of different devices which are not necessarily running the same OS (Windows, Android, iOS, Linux, etc...).
Android and iOS (or any other mobile platform) are the main problems it looks like I will be having on 2 levels.
1 - They are both limited by battery power (more so than a laptop and desktops shouldn't have that issue at all), so whichever method I use needs to take that into account.
2 - NAT (harder because the user has relatively less control over their firewall than on a network that they are running). My central server will maintain a table of which device has what IP address, but from what I understand if there is NAT or a firewall it won't be able to get to it if the port was not forwarded.
Since I will be writing a specific client for each OS I prefer a solution that is more universal. I have been leaning towards writing an extremely simple HTTP server that sits on each client and takes requests (which appengine is able to send) and treats them as messages that alert the client to perform an action (either with the server or another client). However, I run into the issue of NAT/firewall. For instance if appengine needs to send a message to AndroidDevice1 it would grab its IP address from a table and make a request to it. However this doesn't work if the ports aren't forwarded correctly, and if the user is on 3g/4g the firewall is controlled by the data provider.
Because of this, I started thinking about using Android C2DM but I want a solution I could implement across platforms.
The only other method I could think of is to just have the client poll the server for messages. This has the battery and network consumption issue though.
Would there be any other way to implement this, and if not, which one of the above methods are best in terms of balancing usability, power and data consumption and user input (the less the user has to do to get the client set up (ie port forwarding, etc...) the better)? Please note that I do not intend for this to become a discussion/flame war but a logical presentation of facts.
Thanks in advance!
You can create a persistent TCP connection from the device to the server and then communicate over this open connection. This would be a very simple connection with keepalive packets for the most part.
In theory this would consume some battery through the radio, but in practice I have experienced that the battery is not affected much at all. Key is to keep the communication over this line to a minimum.
If AppEngine does not allow this approach, you can run your own socket server and then communicate between this server and the appengine server using REST. A socket server I have used is Apache MINA and had no issues with scalability.
Another problem you will have with this approach or any other approach is that on iOS (afaik) you cannot keep a tcp socket open when the App goes into background. The only thing to communicate with the iOS device is Apple Push Notification Service
I would prefer rather than having HTTP Connection you should create TCP/IP tunnel and make communication fast and reliable. I have one Chat application which runs perfact for me using TCP/IP. If you use this you will have same logic for multiple platforms. Only thing you need to write is different code for iOS and android.

Android App Development - Start a chat with computer device using android phone

I'm trying to learn android and for my app i have few questions.
If i type a computer name on the EditText in my android phone, I
should be able to ping the device (So basically i need to first
resolve the ARP to get the mac address of the device which I want to
ping and then send the ping as an ICMP request).
I believe there is some command to retrieve the computer name and
send this ping command, but i would like to do it the hard way so
that i can learn stuffs better - It would be nice if you can show me
some pointers to some tutorial apps and open source code which does
similar tasks.
Once I have identified and connected to the device. I should be able
to start a chat with the device.
Assume the second device is also an android device, how can I
establish basic message sending from one android device to another.
Basically my app will be a client and server (I guess 2 services - service listening to sockets for incoming messages and client can send out messages).
Does anyone know any sample app / tutorials [basically code examples] which does this in android.
To Nr.1
I'm not quite sure why you first need to ping the device, as you could simply try to connect to the given device (using a timeout) and see if it can be connected.
I found some informations on this, here.
To Nr.2
So, if you want your Devices to communicate to each other, you'll want to use Sockets.
But, if your App is only for chatting and you don't need to know if the last send package was successfully send, you could also use UDP instead of TCP (So you don't need your application to run both the Server and the Client-Socket).
Although, all your questions could have been answered by doing a little googleing...

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