crowsnest_data = request.json
image = base64.b64decode(crowsnest_data['files']['image']['data'])
That way, if I wanted to, say, build an app that does mood lighting depending on how many people are in a room, I could use Crowsnest as my middleman, and then my app would support fifty different cameras and fifty different switches (hypothetically), instead of the one of each that I happen to own and test on. That way, I could swap out devices or distribute my code to others, without having to worry so much about hardware integration. That sounds valuable from my personal perspective.
At least, I think that's how it works, from browsing the site and demos. Feel free to correct me, ianawilson. :)
It is valuable, but has the downside of coupling to a closed-source third-party cloud.
Perhaps a better goal would be to encourage a public collection of CoAP- or OSC-based interfaces for these various end-point devices.
Crowsnest is encouraging people to write and submit such end-point code; better that it be workable with OSS infrastructure.
It would be nice if this turned out to be the "VLC Player" of home hardware, where you could fire it up and expect it to work with most devices.
That would take a ton of work on Crows Nest's part though.
We've also been toying with the idea of using some device discovery so that devices can tell Crowsnest what they are capable of without needing to build a formal plugin for it.
If you're curious for more technical details, there is some info in the docs (https://www.crowsnest.io/portal/docs/). Or if that's not enough, I'd be happy to talk more about it, here or in our IRC channel (#crowsnest on freenode).
That's a nice idea, but unless you control the network - and if you're deploying devices for other people, you probably don't - it's just not feasible. You'll have layers of NAT and firewalls preventing it.
Doesn't P2P works nearly literally everywhere nowadays and aren't there loads of NAT-piercing and/or tunneling libraries that Just Work™? (Well, possibly, unless put behind some truly abysmal corporate firewalls where even plain outgoing HTTP isn't working all the time — but that would be another story.)
Our main goal is to build an ecosystem of ready-to-use devices and a RESTful API around this ecosystem so devs can focus on building their awesome IoT application, rather than bothering with the infrastructure. This is a component of that effort.
You could run a server in the middle; but that's exactly what this is.
It does, in many cases even without on any third party. That is a (mostly) solved issue for at least 5 years or maybe even more. Here are examples of such tools: http://samy.pl/chownat/ and http://samy.pl/pwnat/
There are cases such tricks won't work (like overly conscious connection tracking engine and all ICMP traffic blocked - but without ICMP one would have PMTU issues and those ain't fun), but there're always STUN and TURN. The distinction is, those is not middleman, but just a NAT piercing helpers. They don't pass your traffic through and they're generic and useable with any service.
Sorry for skepticism, but I'd say it's certainly a better to invest the same money in making the same RPi (or alike device(s)) globally-addressable and accessible from the Internet. Indeed, this approach loses all fancy cloud buzzwords, but it brings much more practical value.