Use particle device as Internet gateway for commercial device?

Brainstorming
1

I'm working with a company that builds commercial widgets that contain various sensors, actuators, and servo motors. These devices have unused serial ports and an Ethernet port. They would like the ability to send simple commands and receive small amounts of data to/from these devices via Internet, but they don't want to deal with security issues.
I'm thinking I might use particle device as a gateway to provide the secure interface, and relay data into and out of the widget using the serial interface. The performance requirements are pretty lax, and the small anticipated delays are not significant.
Have any of you implemented a project like this? Is there a better way to do it?

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I think Particle is the way to go there.

not sure about this. I do not know if you can connect the ethernet interface of a Particle to query a sensor in a direct (point to point) fashion. Maybe you'd need a router in between that handles the IPs and traffic.

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@gusgonnet thanks for the response. I'd use serial ports on both devices. I only mentioned the Ethernet port because, in theory, I could implement a server in the remote device and not need particle.io. But then I'd have to implement an ever-changing security barrier.
On a deeper note, a "stretch" goal is to be able to download software updates to the device, which might be on the order of 100KB. Does the particle infrastructure allow for this?

4

You may be in luck, there is a new feature announced few weeks ago that allows one to do this, I think it is in beta. I forgot what was the name of it.

5
  • Serial is a good choice and sounds feasible.
  • Including software binaries for external processors will be available soon, in Device OS 5.5.0. The feature, Asset OTA, was announced last month.
  • With Device OS 5.3.0 and later you can connect via Ethernet to a private LAN with no Internet connection or router, using static IP addresses and ARP for MAC address resolution. The other network interface (cellular or Wi-Fi) is used for the cloud connection and there is no routing between the networks for security.
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@rickkas7 Asset OTA looks like it was conceived for my use case! And thanks for the Ethernet tip - I have cases where I'd like to use the wired Ethernet for a peripheral such as a Modbus user display.

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