I think UDP broadcasts are the goto way to announce availability of a service on a local network (this is how Steam's In-home Streaming does it for instance). But one broadcast likely isn't enough (imagine for instance if the Homebrain core is momentarily offline when the client connects to the network), and an alternative might be for the Homebrain core to do the broadcasting instead of the clients who will instead respond to the broadcast with information about themselves, effectively registering themselves via the REST API.

Another potential way would be to look for clients using nmap.

Alot of progress has been made on this.

The udp broadcaster is working and the clients (simulatedlamp and ttsclient) can now find the homebrain server automatically. They also register themselves at the homebrain server by sending a "add_lamp" or "add_tts" message which a new devicemanager handles and sets them up.

What i don't like about this solution is that lamps and tts are always set up the same way, a chain with a ID filter with a default name and then the agent. Currently it's only possible to add tts and lamps, i would like a dynamic system where you can specify what kind of events the clients accepts and sends.

If these two things are fixed, we can start working on the web interface for configuring clients and agents.