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[FlyingDiver]

The author of the GreenSky plugin indicated his plugin included a Virtual Device for a Weather Station... @Jay what would be your recommendation for establishing a WeatherStation device type that would be updatable via the MQTT events from FlyingDiver's plugin? Clone the Weather Station virtual device from GreenSky, minus that plugins inherent integration with its MQTT functionality?

I recommend that you NOT attempt to do anything like this in the short term. A better solution is coming.

[jay (support)]

@Jay what would be your recommendation for establishing a WeatherStation device type that would be updatable via the MQTT events from FlyingDiver's plugin? Clone the Weather Station virtual device from GreenSky, minus that plugins inherent integration with its MQTT functionality?

I don't know what that virtual device does so it's hard to speculate. Do you want your weather station device to have individual states for each bit of data (temp, humidity, wind, rain, etc), or do you want each of those to be individual devices? If the former, then you'd need a custom device that defines whatever states you want (have a look at the Fantastic Weather or NOAA plugins for examples of that approach). If the latter, then each of the "sensors" of the station could be their own Indigo sensor device. I don't know if there's currently a virtual sensor in any of the 3rd party plugin devices that provide them (and there isn't yet one in the Virtual Devices Interface), but you could probably relatively easily use the Sensor example plugin in the SDK to create your own. I think the only thing you'd need to add would be an action to set the sensor value, which you could then use from your queue parsing script to make the change.

However, given @FlyingDiver's post, I expect that would be unnecessary work as he's probably doing it in his plugin...

[jay (support)]

Y2) I could edit my Alexa skill to send the much lighter/simpler MQTT messages in order to control Indigo, instead of using the heavier HTTP w/ Digest auth calls through the reflector. I will probably try this out next, before I bite off more in the native Smart Home Skill space. I am hoping this is approach is much faster and less prone to issues with caching. What I see with my skill today (with http and digest auth) is that the first call takes a bit and will sometimes time out. Subsequent calls with in the next few minutes are much faster and more likely to succeed. I'm not sure why this is this case, but it reeks of caching... somewhere...

No caching on our side, FYI. If it weren't Amazon, I'd suspect a DNS resolution issue on the skill host side. But surely that's not the case...

[mreyn2005]

@Jay, probably would want the former, since all the sensors belong to a single station. It would be nice to be able to configure which sensors any given station has. Simpler temperature/humidity/uv/air quality micro stations are also on my list.

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-io- ... r/overview

This approach is a bit cheaper and less power hungry than the full blown SkyWeather station. It would be nice to have a few micro stations around the house/greenhouse/indoors.

Any plan to add a standard Sensor (virtual) device type? There are only a few data types to support. Potentially 100's of unit types (watts, volts, amps, lux, ppm, etc) so maybe leave that part a free form input? Even with single sensor support, I could create a group or folder to lump a bunch of station sensors together.

Matt

[jay (support)]

It occurs to me that the GhostXML plugin might work for you (it also accepts JSON), but I'm not positive how it works so you might check that out.

We will probably do a sensor shim device, but it will be a strict sensor type device (one value).

[mreyn2005]

We will probably do a sensor shim device, but it will be a strict sensor type device (one value).

That would certainly do the trick.

Thanks!
Matt

[mreyn2005]

@FlyingDiver
I just tried version 0.0.7 but something is amiss.

[FlyingDiver]

@FlyingDiver
I just tried version 0.0.7 but something is amiss.

You should post the log output. But I suspect it's this one: viewtopic.php?f=316&t=22761#p180396

[FlyingDiver]

Release 0.0.8 posted with fix.
https://github.com/FlyingDiver/Indigo-M ... /tag/0.0.8

[mreyn2005]

Yup that looks like it. Sorry for posting in the wrong room.

Matt