Question

My company is planning on implementing a remote programming tool to configure embedded devices in the field. I assumed that these devices would have an HTTP client on them, and planned to implement some REST services for them to access. Unfortunately, I found out that they have a TCP stack but no HTTP client. One of my co-workers suggested that we try to send “soap packets” over port 80 without an HTTP client. The devices also don’t have any SOAP client. Is this possible? Would there be implications if there was a web server running on the network the devices are connected to? I’d appreciate any advice or best practices on how to implement something like this.

Answer 1

If your servers are serving simple files, the embedded devices really only need to send an HTTP GET request (possibly with a little extra data identifying the device, so the server can know which firmware version to send).

From there, it’s pretty much a simple matter of reading the raw data coming in on the embedded device’s socket — you might need to only disregard the HTTP header on the response, or you could possibly configure your server to not send it for those requests.