Virtual Weather Tile and Other Virtual Tiles

General Discussion
1

What are some good uses for the Virtual Weather Tile or some of the other virtual tiles? I’ve seen a good use for the Virtual Dimmer time that @twack put together. I was just trying to see if there are some other clever uses for the virtual tiles. I want to developer some new Apps for SmartThings, I’m a developer and very comfortable with JSON webservices, but I haven’t see some real good practical usages of either.

Do people have ideas? Or clever ways they have put together the tools that Smart Things make available? I’m trying to see the possibilities of what things will make sense and be easy enough for my family to use.

Thanks in advance.

2

Here’s an example of the “virtual” temrepature sensor that reads data from the web service (Xively.com) rather from the actual physical device:
http://build.smartthings.com/forums/topic/temperature-sensor-with-embedded-chart/

3

Yeah, I’ve virtual temperature sensor, and it looks good. The virtual weather tile doesn’t update often enough, to be used to trigger anything. I could use a virtual tile and have IFTTT do something with it.

I was just looking for other interesting uses of them.

4

I’ve created a Virtual Tile to display stats (current and weekly/monthly) from a solar panel array. It pulls data from a cloud API provided by the inverter manufacturer. It isn’t particularly clever and it works pretty poorly. It never seems to update unless I force a refresh, even though I have polling enabled.