The Hydrosys4 SW is by definition ready for internet connectivity, in fact it is based on a web user interface which can be reached by a webbrowser. The web interface is also responsive so it can adapt to PC screen and smartphone tiny displays.

Once the system is connected to the Home wifi network or LAN, it is immediately reachable, but what about connecting to the system when outside home?

First of all you have to enable the forwarding on your home router, there are tons of examples on google on how to configure it, so I'll not dig on this point.

Assuming your router is correclty configured, things are not done yet, now when you are out from home you will require to know your home IP address but you do not know it. Yes right, in most of the cases you do not know it.

Well 99.99% of the systems that can be domotics, IP cameras, and whatever network connected device do not use direct connection between the user and the device but the following connection path:

The end user (you) connect to a server which is normally run by the same company of the device, this server maintains the user credentials, passwords, and the address of the device. From security and privacy point of view this should be a little concerning but not many people knows this issues.

But the internet protocol was definitely meant to connect everybody with everybody directly (or better everything with everything), so there clearly is the possibility for an user to connect directly to a device without passing through a Server, anyway due to unfortunate circumstances the number of IP addresses IPv4 have been all used already some years ago and now the IP service providers use some NAT dynamic addressing to manage this shortage as consequence your home connection does not have a fix (static) IP address anymore.

It is like if your Home address (I mean the real address: street name, number, post code) is changes time to time and the postman cannot deliver any message to you unless he knows when and how the address has been changed.

To manage the issue the service providers can offer you a static IP address or a DDNS service, and clearly you have to pay an extra for it ...

So to recap, service providers get extra Money, company of the devices can get your data, profile you and even sell you data, the end user have just to pay.

The good news is that the workarounds to this situation exist, the hydrosys4 SW do not use external servers and can act as a DDNS without making you paying a cent. The funny part is that this is a very easy implementation.

If the email is setup, hydrosys4 will send you an email at startup providing its IP address so you can reach the system directly. Around every 15 minutes the system check for its IP address and if it detects that the address has been changes it sends to you an email with the updated address so that it is always reachable. (it has to be notes that the IP address do not change very frequently so the 15 minutes update is more than enough).

As you can see, this is Easy and Convenient :).

Below an example of email sent by the system, where you can see the link for the remote access: