12. Networking¶

Hardware control connected the camera to a wire and a known partner on the other end. Networking is what happens when the partner is not on that wire – a laptop on the same Wi-Fi, a sensor in another room, a server in another country – and when the path between the two endpoints passes through hardware nobody on either side controls.

Two modules cover Python’s side of this. The network module brings the camera onto a network in the first place: joining a Wi-Fi network or plugging into Ethernet, picking up an address, getting the cam ready to participate. The socket module is what Python code opens to actually send and receive bytes once the link is up. The pages ahead walk through what sits between, layer by layer, so “open a socket and write bytes” feels inevitable instead of magic.

Concepts