Virtual BBQ Device and soooo many questions

Devices & Integrations
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I’m experimenting with making a Virtual BBQ device to represent my Big Green Egg. Ideally my BBQ Pit smart app can then feed values into the virtual device temperature values for the pit & the food.

  • Can I have a virtual device with more than one sensor? Or do I have to create multiple devices?

  • Right now my device is pretty empty, but I’m having trouble getting the app approved for OAuth because it says
    "Authorizing the selected devices failed, please try again later".

  • Can I have two SmartApps refer to the same virtual devices? Ie state is set with the service manager, but read with another client smartapp?

I’m sure I’ll have more questions later, but I feel like these are what’s blocking me. Ideas?

1 Like
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Yes, a great example is the weather device, it does temp, humidity, along with several others.

Yes, multiple smartapps can interact with the same physical or virtual device

2 Likes
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Great to hear; I guess I knew it could have multiple sensors on a virtual device, but the oAuth flow seems to let me just pick the device and map it, not the sensor. I’ll have to think about that some more.

So how does this all look?

  • My SmartApp (service manager) has as one of its inputs the virtual device I’m interested in
  • The service manager sends events to the virtual device as it receives calls from the external service
  • Any other app can access that same instance of the device to see what temperatures the BBQ has for meat & pit respectively?

Thanks so much for the help. Maybe if I can muddle my way through this I can make a dead simple service manager/device pair that demonstrates this as most of the samples I’m finding are more complex than this.

–jim

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You may also be making it more complex than it needs to be, think simple or K.I.S.S. If you are simply looking for a single place to monitor 2 temps for lets say this device> you may be able to to write a devicetype that just parses the web data for 1 device, install it twice for once for each each sensor, install pollster to force it to update and use smarttiles to present the data or write a smartapp similar to battery monitor to display the temps. oauth may not be required to get it done or a service manager. Another device to check out is the smartthings-users nest device, it gets lots of different readings from a single cloud device, no oauth or service manager required. Also a github search for smartthings will produce an incredible amount of code examples, some good, some bad, but its a great place to look for code examples.

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Thanks @sidjohn1 - I’ll dig further into the examples. In this case, the data already comes from a device of my own making (rPi -> SmartApp); I’m just trying to get the data into a Virtual Device so another SmartApp can consume it. It seems a little more complex than it needs to be, I agree, I just don’t know the stack enough to make it the simplest version.

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Jim,
Have you seen the “heatermeter” project on github and vwbb forum to control a smoker w/ RPi? This config sets up a web server on RPi accessable via any browser or some existing apps. Hardware and software for this is mature. Sounds like you are building your own custom controller.

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I have seen heatermeter; it’s a cool project. At the time I did this, a buddy and I were learning to design custom boards, and so we did one of our own. The way I currently have it set up is it the pi runs a node app that interacts with our extension board and measure temperatures. It then uses the SmartThings REST API to push temperatures to a SmartApp as I didnt’ want to have SmartThings open another hole into my home network to poll from the rPi directly.

Now I’m hoping to extend this as another science project, and so I’m trying to get the rPi exposed as a device in SmartThings so I can see the current state within the app. I’m just fumbling my way through making it work at this point.