Categories: Python | How To | S60 | Networking | TCP/IP | Code Examples

This page was last modified 20:18, 14 October 2007.

From Forum Nokia Wiki

It's possible to use UDP broadcast with PyS60 (e.g. with ad hoc Wi-Fi networks on the N95). However, the operation is slightly different from that of the standard Python libraries. There are two primary issues:

1) You do not need to (and indeed cannot) call socket.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_BROADCAST, 1) to enable broadcast transmit. Also, the address "<broadcast>" will not be recognized. Use an explicit 255.255.255.255 instead.

Example:

#broadcasts "hello" to all machines on the local subnet, on port 8100
 
outsock =  socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
msg = "hello"
port = 8100
outsock.sendto(msg, ("255.255.255.255", 8100))

2) You must bind to the address 0.0.0.0 to receive UDP broadcast packets. This will bind to all available interfaces. This corresponds to calling bind with an empty string in the standard Python socket implementation. Do not bind to the external IP address of the machine!

This example reads a packet from a UDP connection, and will respond to broadcast packets:

# receives a single packet, including broadcast packets
 
self.insock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
insock.bind(("0.0.0.0",8100))
(msg, addr) = recvfrom(65536)

As a further quick note, it seems that in the pys60 socket implementation, you can use nonblocking sockets by calling socket.setblocking(False). However, this only works for recv() and not for recvfrom().

If you need nonblocking behaviour with recvfrom(), use socket._recv_will_return_data_immediately() (which returns True if packets waiting) to test if there is a packet waiting, then call recvfrom() as required.