I am a student studying Electrical Engineering and I am planning on using the Spark Core in my senior capstone project. Our team is developing a prototype of a magnetic field monitoring system for a professor at our school. We were given a specific sensor to use and are planning on using the Spark Core to forward the sensor data to a server to be processed and displayed. The network admins at our school have agreed to help us set up a closed Wi-Fi network independent of the schools network. This means we do not have access to the internet and will not be able to utilize the Spark Cloud feature.
This brings me to my question, is there any documentation on connecting directly to the Spark Core via TCP programming without using the Spark Cloud?
The best way to do this would be to run the local version of the Spark Cloud on your network. We donāt yet have documentation for this yet, but we will in the near future.
Weāre still working on the Spark local cloud. Iāve been focusing on the comand-line-tool first because switching servers on the core requires juggling some keys and firmware ā i.e. it would be a bit frustrating to use the local server only right now without a tool to make it easier. If it wasnāt as secure itād be easier, but where is the fun in that?
I am hoping this can be ready soon (in the next few weeks), but I donāt have a hard date yet.
Thanks for your answer. Since I will not have the posibility to access to the cloud, I will use the TCP functionality until a local cloud is available.
I recently received my first Spark Core and have been messing around with it for the past couple weeks. It is amazing! Iām looking forward to using additional cores to implement my sensor network.
Do you plan on delivering instructions on how to host the local Spark Cloud when it is ready? I have spent some good time googling how to host a node.js app and it seems relatively complex. (at least for an EE instead of a web dev/ programmer haha)
Also, what is the release date for the local Cloud looking like?
No official release date; itās towards the top of our priority list but there are a few important bug fixes and features that have taken priority. We just wrapped up a sprint on Friday and will be starting another on Monday, so itās possible it might make its way into this sprint (and if so, be completed by Feb 7). Otherwise I would expect that it will be in the following sprint, and be completed by Feb 21.
That type of information is exactly what iām looking for. Do you happen to know if TCP socket communication in a local Wi-Fi network is even possible without the Spark Core first authenticating with the Spark Cloud?
Iām hoping my whole project isnāt 100% dependent on the release of the local cloud but itās starting to look more and more like thatās the case haha
Possible ifā¦ you are compiling the code locally really.
This is going to change real soon when the new code is being pushed to the Web IDE!
Just have a little more patience hahahahaha
Definitely the new changes pushed to the Web IDE is going to be a game changer as it allows you to connect/disconnect to the Spark cloud and do your own stuff.
Good question! Sorry about the confusion, my bad! Those changes are present in the master branch of the core-firmware, but that branch is different from what the build IDE uses. We want to make sure that whatever is built on the IDE is stable and is built using well-tested firmware, because the master branch changes frequently, we lock the build IDE to the compile-server2 branch. About once a sprint (every 2 weeks or so), we rollout the recent improvements to that branch and then any new firmware built against that will automatically include those changes.
Weāre in the process of testing the next firmware release, which Iām hoping will happen sometime next week. You can get these changes now if youāre compiling and developing locally.
