Native device?

[tnesheim 8]

Hi

Is it possible to create a native device(eg a thermometer) using the API and "write" values from a VD or an external device/computer.

 

The reason why I want to do this is that a VD is limited in many ways og using it, but a "native thermometer" is recognized by HC2 as...an thermometer and can be used accordingly.

Edited September 10, 2019 by tnesheim

[10der 830]

No. VD can’t be used like normal physical device. You can develop plugin. But plugin API was closed by Fibaro some years ago.

[tnesheim 8]

My question is not really about using VDs like a physical device, its rather the reason for my quetion.  

 

I have looked at the API and it looks like it’s possible to create native/physical devices in the HC2, at least that what it looks like?

 

And if so, can I e.g. create a thermometer that gets its values updated from an external source(that writers to the API)....

[jgab 1,953]

2 hours ago, tnesheim said:

My question is not really about using VDs like a physical device, its rather the reason for my quetion.  

 

I have looked at the API and it looks like it’s possible to create native/physical devices in the HC2, at least that what it looks like?

 

And if so, can I e.g. create a thermometer that gets its values updated from an external source(that writers to the API)....

 

It depends on why you want to integrate it.

-Do you want it to be treated as a (native) temperature sensor that you can assign the a room and get displayed in the Fibaro GUI (web/app)? - no luck.

-Do you want it to be accessible as a temperature sensor in block scenes - no luck.

-Do you want Lua scenes that you have written yourselves to trigger on or read temperature changes and act on them - easy, no need for native device...

-Do you want others' Lua scenes to trigger on or read your temperature changes and act on them - possible by patching the scenes and overriding fibaro:call and/or fibaro:getSourceTrigger.

 

One could ask why we can't make VDs that look like and are integrated in similar ways as native device. I'm not into the details but I think that Fibaro chose an overly complex model for the plugins and a much more lightweight approach and a simpler contract could have been defined. 

[tnesheim 8]

I use Imperihome as smart home user front end, and it's quite ok. Biggest drawback is that the Imperihome can only show one text line per "tile" for HC2 VDs...and that results in quite a few tiles. Native/physical device can be somewhat more efficient utilized, they can be joined and grouped in Imperihome.

 

Imperihome can also show web pages. I then made a string(with the information I wanted to display) and embedded HTML-codes and put it all in a global variable as a string. I then called the global variable from Imperihome but the response was a JSON structure and the Imperihome "browser" did not recognize the HTML-code.

 

If possible I will try(tonight) to make the response contain the variable value only...by calling something like this   http://<my ip>/API/GlobalVariables/HTMLstr(value)