@dpjanes: Awesome! I’ve been working on a similar project to feed events from non-ST devices into SmartThings and ended up using Xively.com as a bridge because of ST’s cumbersome authentication process (http://build.smartthings.com/forums/topic/temperature-sensor-with-embedded-chart/).
BTW, Xively also exposes its data streams via MQTT. That’s why I prefer it to ThingSpeak, since MQTT is more embedded-friendy than HTTP.
Oh nice. I’ve been playing with MQTT a bit (if you look on the Playground of IOTDB, there’s a connected home thing there that messages via MQTT also). I’ve stayed away from Xively only because I’m not sure if I have a $1000 / year budget to play with stuff!
In terms of your ST implementation, did you have to do the same thing I did - everyone has to install their own copy of the app source code in order to get a safe API key?
I just hope Xively will keep it free for developers
My solution does not use an app. It’s a device type that relies on ‘polling’ property to update itself periodically. This worked quite well until last Saturday when SmartThings suddenly stopped polling. I don’t know if it’s a bug or a “feature”. If it does not resume, I could write my own polling app, I guess. With regards to installing the app, yes, copy-paste is the only way right now.
I saw your demo. Very nice! I think MQTT is an ideal messaging backbone for Home Automation – it’s lightweight, low footprint, low latency. This is perfect for all kind of connected WiFi devices. The MQTT broker can run either on a WiFi router or on a wall-mounted touch panel (essentially an iPad or an Android tablet). This would completely erase the dreaded ‘hub’ from the picture.
I really like what I see in the IOTDB.bridge groovy file you’ve created. I’m a little unsure if I am supposed to setup my own MQTT server to implement this in my own smartapps or if I am supposed to work with the bridge smart app some other way.
I was using HiveMQ MQTT server - it’s kinda flaky though (I do like HiveMQ’s MQTT implementation). Eclipse also has a public MQTT server. IOTDB might offer production-level MQTT services for some small amount of money in the future (10¢/month) but it’s not high on my priority list at this point.
I’m really struggling to write to an MQTT test server from within the smartthings web IDE. I can read and write to to http://test.mosquitto.org/ using local python scripts but not from the web IDE. Does your code successfully write to HiveMQ’s servers?
Hello David, I’ve been trying to implement the bridge but have not been able to get oauth work. When I execute the pythn code I get an error: switchd[‘url’] = “%s/%s” % ( devices_url, switchd[‘id’], ) TypeError: string indices must be integers
Tracing this error led me to check the request which brings nothing back with an error “Access denied” for the specified access token. I tried erasing the smartapp and creating a new one with a new token but had the same error. Am I missing something? I appreciate your help.
