Integrating Indigo with GE SmartHQ IoT appliances

Posted on
Tue Mar 23, 2021 9:02 am
bap offline
Posts: 33
Joined: Sep 25, 2012

Integrating Indigo with GE SmartHQ IoT appliances

We recently replaced our 10+ year old washer and dryer with new GE appliances. They're located in our basement and it's always been easy for us to forget when we have a load of laundry, so with the old appliances I simply relied on Indigo and current monitors to track when they were running and notify us when they stopped running. Being "smart", the new appliances have multiple cycles that made it very difficult for a simple current monitor to track easily, so that approach simply wouldn't work any more.

Luckily both appliances are wifi-capable and can be monitored via a mobile app called SmartHQ. But obviously I wanted to be able to interact with these appliances via Indigo and not their own GE-specific app. After a little bit of hunting I was able to find a project on GitHub called gekitchen that provides a python wrapper around the websocket interface to SmartHQ. This looked like the perfect answer to what I was looking for!

But as luck would have it, the gekitchen python code won't work on MacOS due to an incompatibility with one of the libraries it depends on. Since I just wanted Indigo to respond to events from the washer and dryer, and not control them remotely, I figured this could be easily addressed with the help of a Raspberry Pi. The result is a python script that I wrote that runs on a Pi and uses the gekitchen module to listen for events from the appliances. When it receives events for the appliances it then sends UDP messages to Indigo, and I use the UDP Listener plug-in to receive those events and do what I need with them.

The script is very rough around the edges and would likely need some work to support devices other than washers & dryers, but it's worked pretty flawless for me for the last couple of months, so I figured I'd share it here in case anybody else could find it of use. As of the time of me posting this, the gekitchen module doesn't have direct support for washers & dryers, although there are requests for them to be supported. So my script has some hardcoded assumptions with regards to washers & dryers.

Posted on
Tue Mar 23, 2021 10:08 am
jay (support) offline
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Joined: Mar 19, 2008
Location: Austin, Texas

Re: Integrating Indigo with GE SmartHQ IoT appliances

Thanks for the contribution.

I chose a different and more convoluted route: I installed the SmartHQ IFTTT app and configured it to watch for a washer (and separate dryer) finish notification with an action to write to a single-purpose Slack channel. Then I used FlyingDiver's Slack plugin (which he graciously updated to support incoming events) to fire a trigger in Indigo when there was a post to that channel. Kinda ugly, but so far has been rock solid, all my Inovelli switch LEDs turn green and blink or chase to let us know they're done and I didn't have to write any code.

Once we get to Python 3, a plugin using that gekitchen module for direct integration would definitely be welcome.

Jay (Indigo Support)
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