Overview

Expert Topic for experienced builders.

Big idea

Use the network driver to create a custom client, and expand the result of animating beyond out-of-the-box supported functionality. It is most useful as an entry point for IPC (“inter-process communication”), not for wireless animating.

The Bottango Network Driver is an advanced tool for users comfortable writing their own code, and looking to expand the result of animating beyond out-of-the-box supported functionality, by creating a local client process you can edit and shape yourself.

When To Use the Network Driver

Some example use cases where a network communication hardware driver makes sense:

• I want to communicate from the Bottango app to my own code running on the same computer.
• I want to control a motor that requires a connection to a laptop/desktop computer instead of a microcontroller.

An example of when you would likely NOT want to use a network communication hardware driver:

• I want to control a robot with Bottango wirelessly.

The principal use case for network socket communication is to use it as a pipe for IPC (“inter-process communication”), allowing Bottango to communicate with your own code through a socket connection.

Note

It is possible to use the network driver to send commands wirelessly through the network to a client that is running Bottango firmware. However, routing commands through a network router often doesn’t meet the latency requirements of real-world hardware control.

For better wireless performance with robotics, Bottango developed the relay communication feature set, relying on the lower-latency peer-to-peer ESP-NOW transport protocol instead.

How Does It Work? (and Security)

When you enable a network driver, you create a sockets based server on your network, at the port you indicated. That server will listen for incoming connections, and stream commands to the connected clients for you.

That server is located at the IP address (or localhost) of the computer running the Bottango application on your local network.

Security Considerations

With most default network settings, the network driver server runs on the local machine and may also be reachable from other devices on the same LAN (assuming the OS firewall allows inbound traffic on that port).

The network driver server does not implement authentication/authorization and assumes requests are trusted. It is not recommended to enable a network driver server on networks with untrusted devices or on public/shared networks. It is strongly discouraged to expose the port beyond the local network through network configuration changes such as port forwarding, public IP routing, or VPN access.

What Code Do I Need To Write?

There is a fully functioning example client, written in Python, that can connect to the server and respond to commands from Bottango. You are not limited to using Python; that is just the example given and maintained.

However, though the example client can process and respond to all commands, it doesn’t actually take any actions based on the command. In order to make it more than a simple command responder, you will need to expand it to take your desired custom actions.