Network Drivers

Expert Topic for experienced builders.

Big idea

Use the Network Driver for socket-based IPC (“inter-process communication”) between Bottango and your own code.

One supported communication protocol with hardware drivers is to communicate over a socket-based network connection. It may not be immediately intuitive when this is the right choice for you.

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.

For more information, visit the deep dive section on the network driver.