A GUI for managing powerline devices natively in Plasma, maybe in KNetworkManager

Brainstorm
1

There are a couple of different adapters that connect network devices via your houses electricity lines, using different versions of powerline.

  1. IEEE 1901 (FFT) , also known as HomePlug AV / AV2 , used by TPLink, AVM/Fritz

  2. ITU T G.9960 , aka HomeGrid & G.hn, used by Devolo, Zyxel & Allnet

  3. IEEE 1901 (Wavelet), aka HD-PLC , used by Panasonic and multiple asian vendors

There are graphical tools to allow a user to check the state of the network , update firmware, add or remove devices to the network, configure settings and get debug information like the FRITZ!Powerline app.

This unfortunately is a windows app.

Linux developers worked on various tools to handle these standards and devices on the commandline interface.

  • Open PLC Utils
  • pla-util
  • faifa
  • plconfig
  • hpav

(I am aware that this is mostly Homeplug/AV related, have yet to find tools for the other 2 systems)

Would be great to have a more pleasing graphical interface for this.

I think KNetworkManager would be a good place for this.

2

Not sure this is the right place for this.

So far it is mostly concerned about network endpoints, not network infrastructure.

It might also be difficult to do this in a generic enough way yet still be usable enough.
Depends a bit how much these things are standardized or vendor specific.

One option is always to petition the vendors to provide their tools on Linux as well.
The devices themselves are potentially even using Linux.

It is likely that people will write UIs on top of that as a first step.

Then quite often the programs get either refactored to provide a library which their CLI frontend uses and can be reused by GUI tools or they split into a system/session service and CLI/GUI frontends

3

At least avm is not really interested in porting their GUI application to linux just yet, don’t see enough demand.

I have yet to try a mixed HomePlug environment. From what i see the underlying spec is the same but there can be devolo specific extras to push the speed a bit higher in a pure devolo magic environment. AV1800 i think it was called.

I think the basic management and overview “device name, connection, ip-adress,connection speed, firmware revision, etc ” won’t change between the 3 major “standards” . Rather the backend communication to get the data read/written.

4

I always find that strange given that it will be mostly technically advanced users who tinker with network configuration on that level.

In any case, if they have an Android version it might run in Waydroid

That sounds promising.

Having an abstraction that works with all devices, at least to some extent, makes it much easier to create frontends for them.