nord-sirius

This repository is a fork of genmon/sirius, developed and maintained by Nord Projects.

Want to try it out? We have an instance running at http://littleprinter.nordprojects.co which all are welcome to use!

How to use

Want to get your Little Printer online?

• Hack the Berg Cloud bridge. Follow our step-by-step guide here.

  • If you've already got a hacked bridge using the alpha.littleprinter.com backend, use the guide above but start at step 6.

• Once it's paired with this server, you can use Device Keys with our iOS app, Little Printers, which is also open source!

Using the device key API

Use Device Keys to print through an API. Create a device key from the web interface, and go to that URL to view API documentation.

Developing Sirius

Running on Heroku

We run an instance of this server on Heroku, at littleprinter.nordprojects.co. You are welcome to use our instance!

If you want to run it yourself, this app will run on Heroku, but you need a static IP address due to the way the Berg Bridge connects. We have a droplet at Digital Ocean running nginx to forward the HTTPS connection on to Heroku.

It should also be possible to run in Docker, dokku, or directly with gunicorn, but we don't use it that way :).

Environment variables

The server can be configured with the following variables:

TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY=...
TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET=...
FLASK_CONFIG=...
DATABASE_URL=...

These can be set in the .env file in your checkout.

Creating fake printers and friends

Resetting the actual hardware all the time gets a bit tiresome so there's a fake command that creates unclaimed fake little printers:

$ ./manage.py fake printer
[...]
Created printer
     address: 602d48d344b746f5
       DB id: 8
      secret: 66a596840f
  claim code: 5oop-e9dp-hh7v-fjqo

Functionally there is no difference between resetting and creating a new printer so we don't distinguish between the two.

To create a fake friend from twitter who signed up do this:

$ ./manage.py fake user stephenfry

You can also claim a printer in somebody else's name:

$ ./manage.py fake claim b7235a2b432585eb quentinsf 342f-eyh0-korc-msej testprinter

Sirius Architecture

Layers

The design is somewhat stratified: each layer only talks to the one below and above. The ugliest bits are how database and protocol loop interact.

UI / database
----------------------------
protocol_loop / send_message
----------------------------
encoders / decoders
----------------------------
websockets
----------------------------

Information flow (websockets)

The entry point for the bridge is in sirius.web.webapp. Each new websocket connection spawns a gevent thread (specified by running the flask_sockets gunicorn worker) which runs sirius.protocol.protocol_loop.accept immediately. accept registers the websocket/bridge_address mapping in a global dictionary; it then loops forever, decoding messages as they come in.

Claim codes

Devices are associated with an account when a user enters a "claim code". This claim code contains a "hardware-xor" which is derived via a lossy 3-byte hash from the device address. The XOR-code for a device is always the same even though the address changes!

The claim codes are meant to be used "timely", i.e. within a short window of the printer reset. If there are multiple, conflicting claim codes we always pick the most recently created code.

We are also deriving this hardware xor when a device calls home with an "encryption_key_required". In that case we connect the device to the claim code via the hardware-xor and send back the correct encryption key.