How do IoT WiFi devices communicate?

Hardware
1

This is a bit off-topic for hardware, but I didn’t know where to put it, so…

I have an IoT device that is controlled by the Tuya Android app over WiFi. I know the device’s IP address and MAC address. I run Wireshark and filter on either of these addresses. But I don’t see any traffic to or from the device. How does it work? The only packets I see are it sending a UDP packet every 5 seconds to 255.255.255.255 on port 6667.

When I look at the device’s info in Tuya, it says it has an IP address range (124.148.234.*) that’s not on my network. I presume that’s got something to do with it, but I don’t understand how. Wireshark shows no traffic to or from those addresses either.

Could somebody please point me to some doco on how this works.

Thanks,
Graham

2

Tuya developer site

3

You need to have your ethernet adapter in promiscuous mode to capture traffic for other MAC addresses than what your ethernet have.
You also need to be in the loop between the the endpoints, which means you might need to set up a mirror on specific switch ports to actually see the packets.

4

Thanks for the reply. I did know that. The other answer (below) is what I needed.

Thanks again…

5

Thanks for your reply. That explains it.

Unfortunately, my modem/router doesn’t do port mirroring.

Thanks again