Trying to get mDNS queries working hasn't quite been as straight forward as I was hoping. I mentioned in a previous log that I found a library, but it was a little overkill for what I need, so I did what any silly software developer does: started rolling my own.

How am I justifying this? Well, I'm fast running out of space. The GitHub version of the ESP8266 hardware definition I'm using is significantly larger than the distributed version, so I only have about 10k of program storage left - as a result I'm being more weary of how much source code I'm uploading. Since I don't need to respond to mDNS questions (the ESP libs have one built in), I can skip question parsing, and since I'm only interested in name browsing, I can ignore a all bar two classes of responses. And sometimes learning a protocol can be fun. Sometimes.

My completed library can be found here.

The first thing I did was work out how mDNS works. It's a pretty clever hack - It reuses standard DNS packets, but rather than ask a specific DNS server to answer a query, mDNS clients just broadcast a UDP packet to anyone who will listen. If another listener can answer the question, it broadcasts the answer. You can see more information about the packet format on the mDNS Wikipedia page.

Looking at the packet structure, and looking through the code from this mrdunk's library, as well as some packet sniffing using wireshark, I was able to generate questions and parse answers. This was very much proof of concept code that was embedded in my project, and it worked, though it lacked formal testing, and this would definitely be something I would want to reuse in the future.

ime to break it out in to another library.

Now, my C++ isn't particularly strong, so this sounded like a good opportunity to learn more about C++ classes. I had a niggling concern around code size, memory usage and speed when it came to using C++ for embedded systems, so I did a bit of research around best practices, and found this article. What I found particularly useful in the article was the explanation of how C++ achieves what is does in terms of the equivalent C code. This clicked in to place what C++ was doing and allowed me to make some better decisions around structuring my library. Though I did get tripped up. A lot

The basic rules are:

• Don't use exceptions (you can't on Arduino), so most functions return a status code indicating success or error states.
• Avoid virtual functions where possible, because you end up with a vtable which takes up memory and requires extra cycles to lookup where the address of the required function
• Avoid dynamic memory
• If you need dynamic memory, free it as soon as possible, or make it super long living to avoid fragmentation
• Don't include unnecessary libraries. I thought I would do the right thing and use std::string which abstracts string handling. This made my library's object file an order of magnitude larger. Reverting back to regular char* string keped everything nice and small, and as I didn't need to do much actual string manipulation, the trade of was totally worth it.

Testing

I'm a big believer in automated testing. Especially for something as low level as a library where you rely on certain types of network packets. Automated testing on an Arduino is probably possible, but since I'm not doing anything too Arduino specific, I was able to build a test suite that ran on my laptop. This made the test cycle much quicker as I didn't have to wait for my code to upload. The downside is I need to mock out a few objects, but with some clever code organisation I managed to avoid too many mocks.

I found Catch which is a header-only, lightweight testing framework for C++. It was pretty easy to setup, and works with TravisCI, so every time I commit a change the tests run automatically.

Travis was a bit of a pain to setup, as the C++ they run is ancient, so I needed to setup a custom toolchain in travis.yml.

Once I had everything written and tested, I was able to drop it in to the Garagedoor sketch, and now the sketch can find the mqtt server!