what is the best framework that I should use to make a remote control app for Android. What I want to do is something like Tony Fadel's app for Android and Iphone where you control your house thermostat temperature remotely with a smartphone app.
I was going to use sockets programming, but not sure if that is the best way. If it is then i will use it, but wanted some feedback before i get started.
If I make one android device the server and the other device the client I will still have to manually set the IP address every time I want to connect the client to the server.
I am trying to avoid having to make a web-app and having to make a php website to act as a server for this. Having to keep a server running is too much overhead. would rather make something like two android phones or tablets that can send message to each other over the internet or wifi router without too much setup and effort.
Would appreciate any ideas on this. I can't figure out how the nest thermostat works (http://www.nest.com/) but that is kind of the functionality that I am looking to copy. I wonder if they have to use a centralized server for all of the remote controls. If there is a way to do this peer to peer that would be great. that way all i would need is two Android tablets.
The other examples I can think of is VOIP like skype and google talk. I am sure these don't use a centralized server for voice calls. My needs are much more simple. no voice or video, only sending text messages from one android device to another over the internet. Each android device will probably be using wifi exclusively.
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I need some help in terms of choosing a design option for my problem.
I currently managed to implement a RaspberryPi acting as a Server and my local machine to act as the client. This client send JSON-Data to the Server which processes these. Everything is working as expected and I am using TCP-Sockets for the communication.
My problem:
The next step of my project will be, that I will use instead of a PC an Android-Device as client. What I want to achieve is, to send data to the server on the go. What I mean by that is, I do not want to restrict the server to be in a special network neither the client. What can be expected, is that server and client are next to each other, like in the range of a bluetooth connection. My question is, is there a relatively simple way to implement this communication? Is TCP a possible solution for this (even working in mobile networks?) or do I need to use Bluetooth, or is the way to go, to create some kind of network the client/server connects to and communicate here?
Sorry for propably stupid questions, but I am new to all this network stuff.
EDIT:
Since there were no respones, maybe I can do a more precise question. Is there a proper way to scan a network for a device name?
The only way I currently can imagine is to do a bruteforce like check on every IP-Address and resolve the names?
I first tried to let the Pi host an ad-hoc network, but it seems that non-rooted android smartphones do not have the possibility to access ad-hoc networks.
Therefore I made the Pi acting as an access point.
The communication now is very simple realized by a tcp server-client system.
I am trying to do some wacky home automation which will require me to send a signal from my Android phone to my Pi 3 in order to execute a script to control a motor using the GPIO pins.
The only part I'm stumped on is the best way to connect the Android and Pi.
I've read so many different things and it's all overwhelming, the amount of differing answers I've seen.
So far I'm leaning towards using Jsch in my app to ssh into the Pi and execute the command, but I have been told this is silly.
Can anybody explain to me why this is a bad idea and explain to me a better one? Ideally the phone app would be able to connect over both local network and other networks.
Nothing is wrong with SSH, but people typically use web servers on the Pi plus HTTP requests on the Android side. Or you can run your own protocol via a raw socket connection.
SSH commands might be more secure if you use SSH keys.
Otherwise, you'd be exposing your commands to anyone snooping on your internet traffic, and random people will be controlling your devices
Either way, if you want access both internal and external to home, you can do more research to see if you can "port forward" your router
The advantage of using HTTP for this sort of thing is that it potentially creates its own user interface. What I mean by this is that, if the interface on the Pi is a Web server, then you have a way to provide an HTML/JavaScript interface to your Android device, and thus avoid the need to create an Android app at all -- the user just needs a browser. The whole user interface is managed from the Pi.
I've used this approach for motor control on the Pi a fair bit. On the Pi I use a C program that embeds the libmicrohttpd webserver engine. The program can serve out ordinary HTML pages to create the user interface on the browser, or respond to particular HTTP GET requests that result from the user clicking buttons or manipulating sliders or whatever. You can do some really sophisticated stuff by sending JavaScript functions that make their HTTP requests outside the normal HTTP request/response flow, so you can (for example) have a browser display that updates dynamically (e.g., display sensor values from the Pi).
Moreover, it's easy-ish to provide some kind of security using SSL and HTTP authentication. I prefer C, but there are webserver libraries for Python that work on the Pi as well.
To my way of thinking, the only time it's worth considering something more complex than this is when you need a user interface on Android that can't be implemented in HTML/JavaScript.
I'm sure there are many different ways to do what you want. I prefer to do most of the work on the Pi, because I find writing Android apps deeply unrewarding. On the other hand, if you like developing for Android and have plenty of experience doing so, the approach you suggested -- sending commands to the Pi over SSH -- could work perfectly well. It would just mean doing most of the work in Android.
Yes, ssh is silly solution. I suggest to develop rest api webservice, host it on your PI and invoke it from your Android app
I am creating a multiplayer android game as a part of my coursework. This is my first game. I intended to allow users to connect to the game over a simple network. I don't want to use internet at all hence I wont be using the android game services. How do I go about this. I have no clue at all. I have tried various tutorials but all of them are using a central game server. I just want to create a simple Client - Server network. One user will host a game and others will join.
it's my first time answering a question here. I usually just read here in stackoverflow. I'm also currently working on my first game. It connects devices using wifi peer-to-peer or WifiDirect (without a wifi hotspot). It requires high version of android OS (4.0 or 4.1?) but I believe you can also try the other way on which the devices needs to connect in the same wifi hotspot for lower OS version requirements. The latter, I haven't tried yet.
After I connect the devices on the same network (peer-to-peer), I use sockets to exchange data between them. I use serializable objects for sending data. I don't know if it's the best way but it works for me.
My game can connect more than two players in wifi peer-to-peer. One device acts as the network owner (and also the game server).
See android's tutorial/documentation for WifiDirect connection :
http://developer.android.com/training/connect-devices-wirelessly/wifi-direct.html
Be sure to read also the adjacent lessons.
Also, Sockets must be used with Threads so you also need to read about it if haven't.
Hope I helped ^^
I finally got the solution and made the Android application. Simply used java socket programming. It works on Hotspot. This works on client - server framework.
Please find the code here and contact me if you require any assistance.
https://github.com/rohitramkumar308/GameOfCards
and this is the link to the app
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=srk.syracuse.gameofcards
Hope this helps you.
Hi all I was wondering what options do we have to exchange data between two different android devices?
For example, User-A and User-B both installs my app. I would like User-A to send data (possibly just a simple message or user-A's location info) to User-B.
The functionality I would need is similar to the functionality that WhatsApp has. However unlike WhatsApp, I do not have a server and I was wondering if we could do data exchange between two different android devices without a server?
I was thinking we build it atop SMS or something.
Options for exchanging information between devices are the following:
Bluetooth - this would be between two devices in the near vicinity
TCP/UDP IP connection - this would be using TCP to open a socket directly to another server socket. That could be hosted on the phone or a shared server. There are pros and cons to both.
The pros of bluetooth would be no need for a central server. The big downside is this means you can only exchange data between two people standing within 20 meter range. The other downside is you have to pair the devices which not everyone finds easiest.
You can use TCP/IP connections to exchange data just like any client-server program you write on a traditional computer. This could be used no matter if your phone is using 3G/4G/WIFI/EDGE or future radio protocols. The problem is the IP address of the phone might not be globally reachable. The IP address of the phone might be a non-routable like a private IP. They might be behind a firewall or NAT address.
This is where a central server is probably needed to either exchange IP addresses for users, or serve as a common location for clients behind infrastructure that could block. This is where protocols like SWIFT come in handy for jumping firewalls. Even with things like P2P you still run into these types of issues with non-accessible devices, and tricks like this have to be used to crawl around them. Unfortunately, that means you probably need a central server even with the P2P model.
Without an external server to keep a list of all connected clients, you would need to implement communication in a P2P fashion. Depending on the needs of your app, you could have the user type in the IP address/email/phone number of the other user they want to exchange data with.
If you wish to use a server approach, you can sign up for Google's App Engine which has good Eclipse integration as well as a plugin to easily interface with an Android app. This would give you an infrastructure option without initially (or maybe never depending on how high you scale) having to put down any money.
Google gave a good IO talk showing an example of a web app that can easily communicate with an Android app. You could extend this to do what you are looking to do.
Does anyone know how to implement communication between 2 android devices over the internet without using App Engine? For example, I have 2 Android devices, and I want to send a stream of data from one to the second one over the internet. I would like to know, if someone could give me an idea, how could I identify the second device (or how to create a communication channel between two devices ), so I could initiate the transfer (this is not possible using IP addresses ?).If i were to have my own server, which is the best way to go to accomplish this? If someone could point me to some useful resources I would be grateful.I have some background on android programming.
One way I was thinking to accomplish this was to write an android application, and when the user enters it, it will start a service. This service will then listen for network events and registers on my own server with the username and the IP address of the device as available.When another device wants to send data, it will connect to the server, search for the target device (by username key), gets the IP address and sends the data. Could this work, or does anybody have other suggestions?
One way I thought about doing this is making
(excuse the spelling mistakes if any)
It would help if we knew what kind of data you were trying to transfer.
For small bits of information, like notifications, events, and the like, I would suggest doing an HTTP POST to a server that has C2DM capabilities, and using the server as an intermediary.
For larger data, the only way I can think of to do it is to set up a SyncAdapter, then upload the information to the server. The delay will be a bit longer, but you'll reliably get the information downloaded from the server to the phone. So less of a communication API and more of a dropbox for phones.
I haven't done much with NFC, but that may be something you want to look into.