Apologies as I had a similar thread back in November and never really accomplished my goal before getting sidetracked with another project. By the time I came back to this, my other thread was closed.
What I am trying to accomplish is to make a web application running on my beaglebone black accessible over the internet using a Hologram Nova and Hologram sim card. I have not had much luck in achieving this or finding a tutorial that helps me get closer to my end goal.
Any suggestions or direction would be greatly appreciated.
And at this point I guess I should state that I have my device connected to the hologram network. It just appears as if the device is not accessible over the internet, much like it is being blocked by a firewall.
Is Hologram suppressing the traffic?
Edit:
I have gotten space bridge working to allow me to hit my web application.
However, is there a way to accomplish this outside of Space Bridge? I want anyone with the URL to be able to reach the web app. (I am aware of potential cellular costs ;)) I just want to know if this is possible.
No unfortunately it is not without spacebridge. Without going into too many details (many of which I dont actually know). The cellular network basically works as a large router that does Network Address Translation (NAT). much like your home router does.
For a quick primer, NAT allows you to have multiple endpoints (every computer / smartphone / tablet) in your house connect to the internet through one public IP address (your IP assigned by the ISP). home routers do this by translating your outgoing requests from your computers internal IP and port to the routers IP and a different port. This works great for home users but has the same affect you are seeing with cell traffic where someone on the internet cannot type in the IP address of your kids iPad on your home WiFi since your router doesnt know which of teh many devices behind it you actually want.
Home routers get around this by allowing you to assign specific pubic IP address and port pairs to go to a specific computer in your house.
Unfortunately this simplified “router” is owned and operated by the cell tower operators (not Hologram but Verizon or T-Mobile). This means they would have to assign this IP and port pair (again over simplified) to accomplish what you are looking for. And without being some huge customer like Amazon they wont do this for you.
To accomplish what you want, your best bet is to use some cloud service like AWS, Azure, Rackspace, etc to operate as a proxy. So basically your website would work like:
Internet request => AWS EC2 running custom webserver and SpaceBridge => Beaglebone Device
Then
Beaglebone Device => AWS ec2 that simply echo’s Beaglebone’s response => Internet user.
Now at this point I would recommend you ask “why put my website code on the Beaglebone and not just on AWS, then my custom code could just ping the beaglebone for data instead of sending a bunch of html tags” And this gets you to the more traditional IoT architecture were you have a cloud computer that is accessible from the internet and also has code to poll or request raw data from your IoT devices.