Cloud Sync avoiding Port Forwarding and ddns pains

[Csaba Toth]

The port forwarding and also the dynamic IPaddress handling is a serious pain for ones who doesn’t have experience on this topic.

I was thinking maybe it could be solved on the following way:
A cloud based dataset what is identical of the Firmware parameter set.
A server what serve the App + Browser calls like an “API emulator” using the cloud database.
The Firmware regularly (like in every minute) call the cloud synchronization service and updating both datasets.

Do you think this can be a real solution? If not, what is the main reason?

I know this way the manual operation would became very slow (worst case one minute delay), what is not an issue when you remote operate the system.
But if the syncron frequency can be varied by the user, this can be adjusted to an acceptable level.

Otherwise I could imagine that on local network the OSP unit can be reached directly from the App on a different channel, so we don’t loose the fast response on the site.

I am really interested in your opinion!

Csaba

[Ray]

Yes, adding cloud support is in our long-term plan. In fact, OpenGarage already has cloud support using the Blynk service. This avoids the pain of having to set up port forwarding and dynamic DNS. We are thinking of adding similar features to OpenSprinkler. What you described is one of the several ways to implement cloud connection. So far we’ve tried our best to maintain backward compatibility, that is, we want the same firmware to run on all OpenSprinkler hardware versions (2.0, 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3) as much as possible. This makes it difficult to add features like cloud connection, because the older versions (2.0 to 2.2) have little room left to add anything significant. At some point in the near future we will have to part ways from the older versions and focus fully on OS 2.3 (as well as Linux-based OS such as OSPi). This will eliminate the restrictions and give us the freedom of adding many more features.

[Csaba Toth]

What is your guess when the cloud sync implementation will be done? If I am right the UI can work with the older version through port forwarding and with the new cloud server version paralel. The UI can read the version and handle the differences.

[Ray]

I think initially it will be hard to support all features through the cloud server, i.e. it will be difficult to get every part of the app to work with cloud. Instead, like the current design of OG — some parts, like changing settings, still require local network; but other parts, such as starting a program, testing a value, checking current station status, will be available through cloud. You are correct that the app can read the firmware version to present the UI differently for different firmware (and this is what we do arleady).

[Author]

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