Suggestions for Integrating with a Mobile App

[OttoMan28]

Hi guys,

I need to pick your brains for a good idea/solution. I have created a service program with AutoIt that turns off and on some industrial equipment. It works fine and can be accessed within the corporate/plant LAN. However, I would like to send instructions to my service program from the outside world via a mobile app. My preferred solution is glideapps.com, which creates PWA apps.
It has a limited set of tools to communicate with the surrounding world, but one of them is Zapier, so I have begun looking in that direction.

Before I dive too deep into this, I wanted to hear your thoughts. Perhaps some of you have been in a similar situation and have a suggestion.
For my prototype, it receives instructions via email, which is not very elegant. Also, my aim for response time is about 10-15 seconds, so email is not the way to go.

BTW, I'm not hell-bent on using Glideapps. If there is another tool where you can throw a mobile front-end together, that's fine with me.

Thank you in advance for your help!

[orbs]

@OttoMan28, welcome to AutoIt and to the forum.

i would approach your issue as following:

1) add HTTP communication feature to your AutoIt service program. you may use this UDF ("UDF" is the AutoIt term for a library of functions you can integrate into your script). there are other options of course, google "AutoIt HTTP server" for some more.

2) write a simple AutoIt application with the ability to communicate with the AutoIt service program over HTTP. this will be use as a test inside your LAN and as a prototype for the mobile app development. although this is mostly a testing phase, i would definitely not skip it.

3) punch a pinhole in your firewall to allow external HTTP communication with the computer running your AutoIt service program.

4) develop the mobile app.

with phases 1 & 2 you will find this forum most helpful. start coding and come back if you have any issues or questions.

for phases 3 & 4, you will need to consult your IT team and/or other resources. mobile app development is hardly relevant to AutoIt.

good luck!

[philpw99]

About 3), it's not a good idea to use http directly, especially something that controls industrial equipment.

You need to setup an Apache or Nginx server as the https handler, then do the reverse-proxy to point to your "AutoIt HTTP Server" machine. So from outside, the AutoIt program appears to be using https.

[Skeletor]

Lets say you built the Zapier app, what port would you allow it to communicate back to the servers service?

[philpw99]

The port of course is 445, it's https.

The important part is the url path. For example,

https://mysite.com/zapier/

Just set a handler for "/zapier/" in your backend app (AutoIt in this case).

For this case, I think the way to do it is to create a "WebHook", and let the GlideApp send a webhook notification (https request) to the Apache/Ngnix  Reverse Proxy server (which handles all Internet https requests) with certain path (in this example "/zapier/"), it will forward the request to the AutoIt server in the internal network. AutoIt http server then process the request and turn things on or off. This way it's instantaneous and secure.

Edited April 29, 2023 by philpw99

[TheXman]

32 minutes ago, philpw99 said:

The port of course is 445, it's https.

HTTPS is TCP port 443, not 445.

Edited April 29, 2023 by TheXman

[philpw99]

Yeah, you are right. I just temporarily forgetting things. My memory is not good, even in my youth.

[Skeletor]

On 4/29/2023 at 7:30 PM, TheXman said:

HTTPS is TCP port 443, not 445.

Although the user @philpw99 made a mistake, you can use any non-default port from 1-65535 for use with HTTPS.

Edited May 2, 2023 by Skeletor

[OttoMan28]

Hi Guys
Thanks for your suggestions.
I think the solution to my problem will be, to move away from Autoit and do a 365 connector on the dot-net platform. Then swap messages directly with the Glide-platform,

My connector will (of cause) call a AutoIT script 😉