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Local Control Usage Guide

Firmware Usage Guide​

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ESP RainMaker offers local control when both the device and phone are connected to the same Wi-Fi network, allowing faster and more reliable device control without the need for an internet connection.

To learn what local control is, please click here.

Default configuration for local control​

Default config setting for local control
  • At the component config level, this feature has been kept disabled by default.
  • Initially, local control support relied only on the Wi-Fi level security.
  • Any client on the same Wi-Fi network could discover and control the devices over HTTP.
    (even though the phone apps will only show the devices actually linked to the user).
  • But now we support secure local control (with security level 1 or simply sec1) which is much safer to use.

Therefore, it is recommended to keep this feature enabled in your project's default sdkconfig.

Usage Guide​

Enable Local Control​

To enable local control in your project, please go to default sdkconfig and set the following:

  1. Set CONFIG_ESP_RMAKER_LOCAL_CTRL_ENABLE=y
  2. Set the security mode to 1 using
    CONFIG_ESP_RMAKER_LOCAL_CTRL_SECURITY_1=y
idf compatibility

Secure local control can currently work with esp-idf release/v4.2 (later than release v4.2.2), release/v4.3 (release v4.3.2 onwards) and all the other newer release branches.

Please ensure that you have the latest phone apps and you are good to go. Whenever a device is available to control on the local network, it will show as Reachable on WLAN in the phone apps. If it is a "secure" session, it will also show a lock icon alongside.

internet connectivity still required to add a new device

Internet connectivity is still required to add a new device. A device will be shown as available on local network only if the user-node association process was successful.

For more information on how security is managed in local control, please refer the local control service documentation.

Referenced implementation​

ESP IDF already provides a component called ESP Local Control which uses mDNS based discovery and HTTP based control. This has now been integrated into ESP RainMaker. Since the cloud is no more in picture here, internet connectivity is not required for it to work.

Why not use HTTPS instead?

Using HTTPS in itself isn't sufficient without mutual authentication. This requires unique certificates to be provisioned on the devices and the users (phone-apps).

  1. For the users, the same certificate should be propagated across all the phones/clients corresponding to the same user
  2. Some phone operating systems (iOS) do not allow self-signed server certificates. This makes provisioning device certificates more complex.

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