I hope everyone is well. This is my first post and I apologies if I have missed anything obvious.
I am writing to you as I was wondering if it is currently possible to connect a photon to a photon and an iPhone WITHOUT the Cloud. In iOS, this is called multi-peer connectivity and I have struggled to find whether the proton has this capability (or even, connecting to two protons).
To be more exact I want to get to create a three point network. The first point would be an iPhone with the midpoint and the lastpoint being Photons. I am aware that I could just convert the iPhone to the midpoint but I am wondering if it were possible to make a proton the midpoint, to reduce processing on the iPhone side and for future projects envisioned at creating a mesh of protons.
If anyone knows a solution, would it be possible for them to please lay it out for a Photon Rookie ?
Well as far as obvious, I’d first point out it’s a Photon, not a Proton. It’s a fairly massive difference. </puns>
AFAIK the Photons can’t do any radio frequency other than 2.4GHz WiFi. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Basically the answer to your question is no, Photons can’t do peer-to-peer. The closest you can really get with these devices would be to redefine “cloud” to mean “local iOS app that acts as a web server.”
The simplest way I could envision accomplishing your goal would be:
Create a wireless LAN. Connect each Photon & the iPhone to it. This does not require a cloud, or an internet connection, only a router. (Can iPhones act as APs?)
Write an iOS app that acts as a local web server.
If the nearby Photons are keyed to look for a specific local domain name that redirects to your iPhone, the iPhone can communicate with the Photons as if they were online – but you’re really just using a local server. Does that make sense? I don’t think it’s going to be what you’re looking for from the way you describe it, but it’s the closest I could think of using a Photon to accomplish this.
The big picture here is that these Photons don’t have any routing algorithms. Every communication must be between a Photon and some WiFi access point. You don’t have to make it to the internet though. You can just have Photons talking to some other machines on that same access point.
It may be possible, although I’m not expert, to just have raw UDP sockets or something – that may introduce a way to provide Photon-to-Photon communication by broadcasting and receiving from each Photon simultaneously. Not sure.
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