BWA Spa Control App

[cad1231]

Hello,

Does this gem allow control of the spa through the BWA Spa Control app? I installed it with gem install balboa_worldwide_app. I have an RS485 to wifi bridge installed inside my spa, and I can connect to it using /usr/local/bin/bwa_mqtt_bridge mqtt://[creds]@[mqtt service]/ tcp://192.168.20.75:8899.

That gives me MQTT and HomeAssistant control -- everything works. However, the BWA Spa Control app does not see the spa. Is there anything that I am missing?

Thanks!

[ccutrer]

The BWA Spa Control App only works through the first-party BWA WiFi adapter. This gem does not emulate that adapter, so you would need to have both plugged in. I forget if that is even possible.

It seems like a reasonable thing to emulate their WiFi adapter so the app will work as long as the app still allows direct local control. It definitely won't be possible to connect to their cloud service. I haven't even attempted to use the BWA Spa Control App in over a decade - I just used local control via this gem. And I no longer even have a BWA spa, so will not be developing such an additional feature for this gem, but if someone is willing to work on it I'm happy to review any PRs.

[cad1231]

Got it, that all makes sense. Someone wrote code in C to emulate the WiFi adapter for an ESP32 that would be hooked up directly to the spa: https://github.com/NorthernMan54/esp32_balboa_spa. It looks like the assignment would be to port that code to something that doesn't require a directly-connected ESP32. When I have some time, I'll look into it.

[cad1231]

I managed to get this to work -- it was actually pretty simple. Using python, I set up a listener for UDP broadcasts on port 30303 and whenever there was a broadcast, I responded with b"BWGSPA\r\n00-15-27-34-56-78".

Then I set up a very simple TCP rebroadcast server -- also using python -- that took everything coming in from the EW-11A and broadcasted it on port 4257. If anyone wants quick and dirty code, it's attached. Note that there's a bunch of hardcoded IPs, etc.

In a linux environment with python 3 installed, run python3 discovery.py and python3 rebroadcast.py.

Note that you have to run both scripts on the same server because BWA's discovery protocol relies on the responding machine's IP. The IP in the header of the responding packets is the IP that the app will look to to get a stream of data on port 4257 (TCP). I would love nothing more than to do away with rebroadcasting and point the app to the IP of the EW-11A, but that would require sending UDP packets with a spoofed IP in response to a broadcast from the app -- which I don't want to do. Instead, I pointed the bwalink ruby app to my rebroadcasting server to ease the strain on the EW-11A. I am concerned about the strain on the EW-11A because it's already in the very reaches of my Wi-Fi network, being outside and all.

I'll get around to dockerizing this eventually for my own setup.

Sorry @ccutrer , I would do a PR but I don't speak ruby very well. 😄 Maybe someone else can take that on using my quick and dirty code as inspriation.

rebroadcast.py
discovery.py