Connect to Cayenne with Arduino+Esp8266(01) behind university proxy

Lets keep this short,

  • Device & model: Arduino Uno with ESP8266 (or serial USB)

Bug: My college gave me a proxy and port number that i need to enter in my browser for the internet to work like this:

Now, when i connect arduino via usb serial( not any wifi or ethernet shield or esp8266)to my laptop(which is connected to internet via ethernet) i cant connect to cayenne and it shows device offline. But if i instead of the ethernet use my phones data as hotspot and connect my laptop (obviously disabling the manual proxy), and try to connect , it works( i need to run the cayenne-ser.bat file and com2tcp.exe). But it works. But i want to use college wifi or lan instead of my mobile data which i am not able to do currently.

I guess I could explain somehow my problem. I should also mention that i have not used esp8266 as i wanted to know before buying since if i cant enter my college proxy and port i cant use the internet and my money will be wasted.

Is there any cure for my issue?

Than you.

Hi @prantikmajumder, thanks for joining the Cayenne Community.

I don’t think the fact that you’re using a proxy server is the specific issue here, if your laptop is configured to connect to this server OK (and it sounds like it, you mentioned the laptop has internet access), then the Arduino shouldn’t need any special settings for it since its just piggybacking on the laptop’s network connection.

My guess is that your university network is blocking network traffic on port 8442, which Cayenne uses to communicate with Arduino devices. Can you verify with your university IT department if this is the case (and if they can make an exception for you)?

1 Like

that was a dank fast help…thnks a lot…
but when u say piggybacking i think its not like that… cause when i am connected to internet via lan on my laptop(where i have to set univ proxy and port number), and i use “virtual router” or “mhotspot” or any hotspot app, and connect my phone to that wireless hotspot, i then also need to go to “advanced settings” on my phone and put that (univ) proxy and port number else i cant have internet access.


so if the phone was just piggybacking my laptops internet then i would not have required to enter the proxy and port numbers. But I need to else i cant have internet access on my phone.

I can do one thing if you like. I can try to connect arduino to cayenne using univ proxy and port and give you image of the command prompt output where I ran “cayenne-ser.bat”. And any other test you want me to do I can try.Also I will try to verify with IT dept. but I wont count on them so much (sigh) .

again thanks a lot.

It’s probably worth making sure that port is unblocked as that would ultimately be an issue here even if I’m misunderstanding the network situation. Certainly feel free to post your output from a failed connection attempt here to see if it yields any hints.

This is a different product, but we use their same USB Serial connection script and the consensus on their end seems to be that if the PC running the script can access the internet via proxy, then the Arduino connected to that PC via the USB script should be able to use the PC’s network connection as well without further configuration.

If your IT is being slow about responding, you could test this for yourself, see this post where I show how to use PuTTY on a Windows laptop to check to see if it can connect to arduino.mydevices.com on port 8442.