Basic connectivity question

Mozilla IoT
#1

Hi
I’m trying to understand the WebThings Gateway and reading the documentation I can’t figure the connectivity model used.
Let’s say I have three IoT devices in my network monitored and controlled using the WebThings Gateway, in my network I have a router that connects me to internet and provides the wifi connection to my home and I have the Raspberry Pi that runs the Gateway, would these devices be connected to my router and RPi is monitoring them and controlling them via the router or they will be connected directly to the RPi?
The reason I’m asking this question is to understand if there is a solution to connect and control all my IoT devices using only the RPi assuming I don’t need and want any internet connections (let’s say for security reasons).

Thanks in advance for your help.

Amir

#2

It entirely depends on the devices you’re using.

If you’re building custom web things with the WebThings Framework, everything will work locally with no internet connection.

If you’re using commercial devices, it depends. Some devices work perfectly with no internet connection, such as Zigbee, Z-Wave, HomeKit, and TP-Link. Others require a constant connection to some cloud server.

What devices are you trying to use? Maybe that could help determine the correct answer here.

#4

Thanks for the quick reply,
My question is not really about the internet connectivity, it’s more about the connection topology of the WebThings Gateway. I like to understand if the IoT devices would connect to the Gateway or the router.
To simplify the question, do I need to have a router to connect an IoT device to the Gateway or not? To give you specific device assume I have two LG TVs only.
The guideline (https://iot.mozilla.org/docs/gateway-getting-started-guide.html) has a step that requires me to connect to my home wifi that’s why I posted this question, what if I don’t have a home wifi, can I just have the RPi and two TVs and still run the WebThings Gateway and connect and control my TVs or the TVs really are connected to a router and my RPi also connects to the same Wifi network and discovers the TVs but to connect to them it has to go through the router always.

Hope this is more clear. What I like to see is a connection diagram that shows who talks to who in a typical network with RPi as Gateway and two TVs I have.

Amir

#5

Again, it depends on the devices.

If you don’t want to connect your RPi and devices to your existing network, what you could do is start an AP on the RPi (we’ll have an OpenWrt build soon that will make this easy). Then, you could connect your devices directly to the RPi, rather than your home Wi-Fi. However, there are 2 caveats to this.

  1. If the devices do not function without a connection to their respective cloud servers, you’re not going to be able to do anything with them. For instance, Eufy devices are controlled via the cloud servers. That was the point of my last post. For LG TVs in particular, they should function fine locally.
  2. In order to actually control the things attached to the RPi, you’re going to have to connect to it with your phone/laptop/etc., or connect the RPi to your home network. Otherwise, you’ll have no way to access the web interface.
#6

Thanks,
I have all I needed now, the OpenWrt router part was the missing part, I assumed that the WebThings Gateway also provides the functionality of OpenWrt and based on your reply that assumption was not correct (at least at this time).

Amir