XBoxOne Integration with SmartThings

[jacobrossi]

I started on a solution that doesn’t require IR blasting. The Xbox One gets powered on via a special socket packet constructed from the Xbox’s Live Device ID. There are several examples out there on how to do that. I based mine off of xbox-on available on npm.

Xbox One integration

I’ve started on a solution that doesn’t require IR blasting: https://github.com/jacobrossi/smartthings-xbox There are several limitations currently: For now, it does require using a computer as a “bridge” because ST doesn’t have a proper sockets API. You run a very lightweight server on any computer on your network (I’m using a Raspberry Pi that was already in use for other HA stuff) and it powers on the Xbox when it gets requests from ST. It can only turn it on, not off. It does not (yet) indicate the actual power state of the device. So if you power it on/off manually, it’s not reflected in SmartThings. But so far I have this as a part of a “TV” routine that dims the lights, sets some RGB cabinet lighting to a soft amber color, turns on the fireplace if its co…

So right now my device just pings a simple node server (running on a Raspberry Pi) which makes the socket request to the Xbox (given the limitations on ST’s ability to use sockets). I’m investigating whether I can use the solution described here for sending the packet directly from ST without needing the node server as a bridge:

Raw TCP Socket Communications with sendHubCommand()

The hub doesn’t actually interpret the data. All non-discovery LAN socket traffic goes up to the cloud where the cloud looks for a valid HTTP frame to pass a whole response up to the device type. This allows a developer to handle the whole response in one ‘event’ rather than having to reconstruct the buffer or worse, not know if the whole frame was received or not. The requests and responses aren’t size limited rather time limited to ~ 8 seconds for a whole request response transaction. If the Raw Socket flow was used, this RESTful timeout doesn’t apply. Currently for this to work we are waiting on the RAW socket feature support to be added to the cloud. Hoping we get this out soon as well!