I'm looking to learn about the existing "Powerview" plugin.
This is a plugin that lets Indigo work with Hunter Douglas Powerview shades and control system. It lives in the plugin store. The "get help" and "check the online documentation" links point to GitHub. There is some info there, but docs are kind of thin.
The developer does not have a separate developer area in the forums. No-one matching his last name ("Hodel') produces any hits in search-by-author in the Indigo forums. A search for "PowerView" in forums finds few hits, and none of it related to this plugin, as far as I can tell. I suspect there are at least a handful of users of this plugin, based on some traffic on GitHub.
So the thrust of my meta-question is: how should it work in the Indigo ecosystem for someone like myself potentially interested in a plugin but who may not (yet) own the hardware required to fully install/use the plugin to test it out through first-hand use to hear from other users of the plugin, assess how well it works, and possibly ask questions about what features it support?
I would suggest that it would be useful for me and I would argue possibly for the Indigo user community as a whole if setting up plugins in the plugin store provided a bit of extra support for community interaction by automatically setting up a forum in Indigo forums for discussion and Q/A. A somewhat different topic, but it would also be great if we could see some demographics like # of times plugin has been downloaded, # of Indigo installations that have the plugin enabled, etc. Better still a "rating" system like the app store, where people can rate and leave comments.
My real (non-meta) question is essentially whether the plugin is able to track changes shades, including those that are happening due to something other than Indigo sending commands, for example due to a user pushing a button on a remote or using the Hunter Douglas app to control the shades. I try did try downloading the plugin. It comes with a ReadMe that talks about the data structures that are used through the http-based interface. The plug appears to allow one to create triggers based on device state changes. However, I still can't tell whether it tracks changes and if so whether it can support close to real-time tracking vs. if it just does periodic polling (perhaps with rate limiting?).