Can moode use wifi to reach to internet?

[guermantes]

I would say no myself, but I promised my sister I would ask:
She has no ethernet-bound internet access but she has a cell phone with a flatrate. Could moode access her phone in Wifi tethering mode in order to reach the internet, instead of going by cable to a router?

[Nutul]

I would say no myself, but I promised my sister I would ask:
She has no ethernet-bound internet access but she has a cell phone with a flatrate. Could moode access her phone in Wifi tethering mode in order to reach the internet, instead of going by cable to a router?

If you set-up an access point from your (well, her) phone, then you can tell moOde to connect to it, and voilà...
So, long story short: yes. (but... wasn't that easier to try, than to ask for...?)

[guermantes]

I would say no myself, but I promised my sister I would ask:
She has no ethernet-bound internet access but she has a cell phone with a flatrate. Could moode access her phone in Wifi tethering mode in order to reach the internet, instead of going by cable to a router?

If you set-up an access point from your (well, her) phone, then you can tell moOde to connect to it, and voilà...
So, long story short: yes. (but... wasn't that easier to try, than to ask for...?)

Thanks for replying!

It would have been easier if I'd had access to her r-pi, but I'm in a different part of the city, so in this case it was easier to ask rather than teaching her how to do a remote teamviewer session. ;-)

[TheOldPresbyope]

I would say no myself, but I promised my sister I would ask:
She has no ethernet-bound internet access but she has a cell phone with a flatrate. Could moode access her phone in Wifi tethering mode in order to reach the internet, instead of going by cable to a router?

If you set-up an access point from your (well, her) phone, then you can tell moOde to connect to it, and voilà...
So, long story short: yes. (but... wasn't that easier to try, than to ask for...?)

Yeah, it should work, but don't forget there needs to be some device running the moOdeUI. If the player in question has a local touchscreen display, then no problem. If it has to be the phone, there's the problem of discovering the player, since there likely won't be any local domain name resolution.

Case in point, as a test I'm running a Google Pixel 6A phone as a WiFi hotspot which connects to my cellular phone service. 

I then configured a moOde 8.2.4 player to connect to this hotspot. The player's assigned IP address is 192.168.144.121, which certainly isn't obvious. I found it with the utilities I load on all my portable devices. Use this address in the Chrome browser on the Pixel and et voila there's the moOdeUI. Using the hostname or hostname.local convention doesn't work.

As an aside, I also had no problem connecting an iPad to the same Hotspot and running the moOdeUI on it.

Internet radio stations seem to be playing ok, mostly, I experienced some breaking up on one but I think that was an Internet problem.

YMMV

Regards,

[guermantes]

The player's assigned IP address is 192.168.144.121, which certainly isn't obvious. I found it with the utilities I load on all my portable devices.

Great. Although...
I figured I would use Fing on my android to find the ipadress of the moode, but when I enable access point on the phone, the wifi is shut off and Fing will not work. Are you using a terminal emulator  app to run commands?

[TheOldPresbyope]

The player's assigned IP address is 192.168.144.121, which certainly isn't obvious. I found it with the utilities I load on all my portable devices.

Great. Although...
I figured I would use Fing on my android to find the ipadress of the moode, but when I enable access point on the phone, the wifi is shut off and Fing will not work. Are you using a terminal emulator  app to run commands?

Sorry, I should have named names

As you say, Fing disables its network scanning function when my phone is in hotspot mode and connected to the Internet via the cellular data network. Interestingly, its ping function still works.

However, the LAN scan function in an app called "Network Analyzer Lite" by Jiri Techet does the trick for me. I've used both this app and Fing for years.

I've just found another fly in the ointment-

If I turn off the local hotspot and turn it back on, the moOde WiFi interface doesn't automatically reconnect to it. I have to power-cycle moOde to get the connection back. This is annoying to me but not a show-stopper. Your sister may see it differently (mine would!). 

No time to think about this; perhaps some other dev has a thought.

Regards,
Kent

[guermantes]

Thanks.
The fact that it doesn't reconnect by itself would indeed be a drag, but I'll let my sister be the judge if she can live with that.

I did some experimenting and found out that Moode can talk on two different subnets at the same time, over Ethernet from laptop on 10.x.x.x and over WiFi from cell phone on 192.168.x.x. That's great, because with a lame router without external internet access one can still access the web interface at moode.local from the laptop and then just check on the Network settings page what IP address is assigned to Moode-rpi by the cell phone access point's DHCP. Then just set that IP as static in the WiFi settings and Moode will always get the same IP when connecting to that cell phone.

And since the connection over Ethernet always stays alive, when the hotspot AP is turned on again after having been off, she can always power cycle from the web interface rather than pulling the power cord (which would not be good for the hard-/software).

Interestingly, I was pulling my hair for one hour without understanding why Moode could not connect to my phone's AP (OnePlus 3) with correct password when other devices could connect without problem. It was driving me crazy! Then I tried with a newer phone (Samsung A52S) and, hey presto, it connected immediately to that phone's hotspot AP. The software must be too old in the OnePlus from 2017.  Weird though...

EDIT: even more curiously, I loaded a "competitor" player (a couple of years old) in the RPi, and it can connect to my OnePlus hotspot...