DeviceHub Networking Requirements and Technical Specifications for PitneyShip and PitneyShip Pro

DeviceHub is a program that connects your printers and scales to PitneyShip Pro. DeviceHub is required for printing stamp rolls and envelopes. The following are required in order for DeviceHub to work properly on your network.

• Technical Specifications
• Operating System Requirements
• Whitelist
• Technical Architecture

Technical Specifications

Ports

The following ports are used for the communication with AWS IoT and AWS API Gateway:

• 8883/1883: MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport Protocol, IANA Official)
• 443: https/wss for MQTT secure connection for registration
• 10101: WebSocket connection port for OCR App & Scanner
• 8091: HTTP connection for DeviceHub Registration process (If another application is using port 8091, DeviceHub will not be usable. This port needs to be isolated for DeviceHub.)

There are a few Remote Procedure Call (RPC) communications ports – 4042 and 4043. These RPC ports are used for local messaging queue (ZeroMQ) Communication:

• TLS 1.2
• x.509 certificates

Inputs

• AWS IoT messages with small JSON payloads
• Jobs
  • Print - GIF file for INDICIA and PDF file for sheet
  • Scale

Outputs

• Events
  • Heartbeats with Health checks
  • Notifications: if the upgrade is available.
  • USB and Job (print) details
• Scale Data
• Scanned address (ASCII format) using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanner

Storage

• x.509 certificates or root certificate authority (CA) - device certificates (.crt, .pem, and root CA)
• Configurations: number of devices, registered devices, scale, and last shadow state
• Logs for diagnosis & troubleshooting
• HTML pages for Out of Box (OOB) process
• No PII info is stored within DeviceHub
• No local database

Communications

Localhost or 127.0.0.1 is used for device activation and RPC communications.

Operating System Requirements

Windows

• DeviceHub is verified on 64-bit versions of Windows 10 and Window 11.
• The latest version updates must be installed.
• DeviceHub must be installed on the C drive.

Mac

DeviceHub is verified on the following Mac OS versions:

• MacOS Catalina
• MacOS Big Sur
• MacOS Monterey validated through 12.5

Whitelist

The following address must be whitelisted.

• a2dflzkdcuxckx-ats.iot.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

Technical Architecture

• A print request from PitneyShip Pro is sent to DeviceHub for shipping labels, stamp rolls, stamp sheets, and barcodes.
• The print request is submitted to AWS API Gateway/Lambda.
• The request is verified using a unique device signature from Mongo DB.
• AWS API Gateway submits the print job to DeviceHub Agent through AWS IoT core via a secure channel with x.509.
• DeviceHub Agent prints the INDICIA (gif) & Sheet (PDF) using the job information and passes the print confirmation to AWS IoT core.

Related topics

• Networking Requirements for PitneyShip Pro, PitneyTrack, PitneyAnalytics, and the Locker Management Module