Hi - I got a TV device connected to my LAN and I'm looking into get a replay status from a ping to determine if the TV set is turned on. Is there a way to do a ping from within a pronto script?

Cheers!

I might be wrong but there is a possibility the device will pong when it's offline. The net interface has to works if you waht to wake it, so ping should also.

Which TV, does it have LAN control?

You will not be able to "ping" from Prontoscript. However, you can try and do a connect to the IP/port and if that fails, you can be sure TV is not present. However, connect might succeed even if TV is off.

Also, depending on the specific implementation, the device firmware designer might choose to not support the the ping protocol (ICMP) altogether. If so, it will never reply to ping.

I can't see a reason why ping isn't possible? Should be quite easy to build in prontoscript.

So, how might you do it? UDP?

According to:

[Link: en.wikipedia.org]

ICMP is an Internet Protocol whereas TCP and UDP are Transport Protocols. Pronto uses a combination of IPV4 Internet Protocol and TCP or UDP Tranport Protocols. I would think this is not possible based on available objects in ProntoScript. To work with ICMP, I believe that one would have to have direct access to the Internet Protocol as well as the Transport Protocol for the TCPSocket or UDPSocket. Am I incorrect in this assumption?

If you'd like to view PING.C source code, you can download a zip here:

[Link: programmersheaven.com]

No ping can't be made with Prontoscript as it uses the ICMP protocol, which the pronto has no direct support of. I mean it has it built in (you can ping a remote and it replies, and every device that communicates via IP has to have ICMP as it is a control protocol for IP) but we don't have any direct access to it.

It is a protocol of the Network layer (ISO-OSI model) like IP. But pronto supports direct interaction only with upper layer (Transport layer) protocols, TCP and UDP.

So Lyndel you are correct.

It's a Philips 37pf9731d. I don't think the TV supports any control via the LAN port. At least I have not yet managed to get hold of any info about such a feature. To my knowledge the LAN port only supports a Philips streaming protocol. Anyway.. the goal was to control the TV's "power off" since the IR "power" functions only offer "on" and "toggle". I achieve that goal via sense input @ the rfx by connecting it to the USB port of the TV (5V output)

Actually I was thinking of UDP ping. But after reading the source I see that it also looks at the ICMP return.

I tried to do my homework on this. I located the source for "ping" in C several years ago, reviewed it, and did not think it was possible without having low-level socket API access. I have now refreshed my fading memory. (I guess that ping timed out) ;-)