ESP8266 ESP12 hosts equivalent

Aelita Sophie · July 6, 2017

I'm still fairly new to Arduino's or arduino-like products. So I figured to ask this question here, as googling it hasn't given me an answer I could work with.

I'm currently making a SmartHome system, that currently has a temperature sensor, a central heater controller and a web-app to control it.

Looking forward, I want to make this system a bit more advanced. So I'm currently adding my electricity meter and gas meter.

So I hooked up a ESP8266 ESP12 (NodeMCU 0.9) to the P1 port on my KFM5 Kaifa Meter.

It works completely fine, and gives the results I'm searching for. Also it manages to send it to api.example.domain.ext (insert "real domain" here)

But this requires the ESP to have a valid internet connection. So currently the signal goes through my router, to my modem, then back to the router and then towards the server that hosts the database and webserver.

My thermostat is working on a raspberry pi, since it's linux I can simply can edit the hosts-file equivalent to point api.example.domain.ext to a local IP for example 10.0.2.2

I've done this, so the thermostat can have more control on the GUI then anything that is connected outside the network. (Thermostat has a touch screen display)

Also this gives a nice side effect that, if my internet connection is down, the thermostat would still work.

Since the ESP12 isn't linux based, and uses C/C++ I have no clue how to get somewhat the same results.

As it is able to resolve api.example.domain.ext, it should be possible right?

Any idea how?

djneo · July 6, 2017

Personally i do not know if its possible to change that on an esp, but you could change the domain to the ip adres and maybe have that vhost as default server in apache.

Or you could change the dns on the esp in your script to a proxy dns on your raspberry pi, so that it stil goes to api.*.*.com but its resolved to your Raspberry

Aelita Sophie · July 6, 2017

Just now, djneo said:

Personally i do not know if its possible to change that on an esp, but you could change the domain to the ip adres and maybe have that vhost as default server in apache.

Or you could change the dns on the esp in your script to a proxy dns on your raspberry pi, so that it stil goes to api.*.*.com but its resolved to your Raspberry

The webserver/api isn't hosted on a raspberry pi, but on a Plesk powered Ubuntu server. It also hosts a DNS server, but that controls the actual domain for real. Not for local use, if you get what I mean. I could force the arduino to use a different DNS server. But I kinda want to hardcode this.