bonjour support

[muttnik]

I note that apple's bonjour service discovery is sneaking into use in things marine. In addition to their own mechanism (multicasting a JSON string containing available services) Navico's GoFree stuff claims to implement it and along with SSDP it's supposedly a part of OneNet.

Are there many marine apps currently coded to discover an nmea-0183 tcp service automatically via bonjour? I note that the majority of apps Navico describe as working with GoFree expect you to manually tap in the MFD's address (ie they don't do service discovery at all). I wonder how many of the ones which do do service discovery use only the navico protocol rather than bonjour.

I was playing with manually configuring avahi on linux to advertise nmea-0183 via bonjour (seemingly easy) which might be of interest to linux users using OpenCPN as a tcp server for a mobile device, but I wanted to check that (a) my config worked with an actual marine app rather than a test rig (so free apps good) and (b) that there are apps using it which make it worth bothering about.