Is there an easy way for the public to find DTHs I write, so they can use devices I make and give to them.
I’m assuming there would be a public place to save my DTHs where people who knew the exact name of the DTH could find/retrieve it.
I’m hoping to avoid having to create/login to their SmartThings groovy acct to create a new DTH by pasting my code into their ‘new device handler’. If I make and give some ESP8266 type devices to friends/fam, it would be great if they could just search for my DTH in a public place, when they add ‘new thing’ and BAM… they’d be up and running
It depends whether you want to just limit it to your own friends. If you do, probably the easiest thing is to set up a github account and give them that.
If you want it to be easily findable by anyone in the extended smartthings community, then you would start an author’s thread in the community-created device type handler section of this forum and in the first post in that thread include a link to your Github.
That way you will also automatically be notified when anyone posts a question or comment to the thread.
From there, the thread can be added to the quick browse lists in the community - created wiki, which make the search much easier, and maximizes the number of people who will see it:
But unfortunately none of that changes the fact that they have to go into their own IDE and add the DTH there. There’s no way around that step at the present time.
Thank you very much JDRoberts for the info. Like you said, there’s no way around the setting up the custom DTH via the IDE. Too bad you couldn’t access the community-created DTHs via the ST phone app by searching by a registered known DTH ID code… the DTHs could be ‘unlisted’ in the app, but at least find-able if you knew the exact ID code to search for. (just wishful thinking)
Wouldn’t you just use GitHub for this? Especially since each person’s IDE can be integrated with GitHub and then any time there’s a change they can just say update from your Repository?
I would think that someone adept enough to write a DTH, could in theory spend the time and effort to write a script that would accept the user ID / password pair and automate the process although captcha could be problematic…
Barring that, write up instructions so well written that as the ad says, a caveman could do it…
Your repository should theoretically be Github. However you are certainly free to post code to whatever web site you want it on. How much work do you want to do with this?
Honestly your best approach is to write up the howto, complete with screen shots, to basically walk the user through the process in as fool proof a manner as possible…
