Super Generic Things

User
#1

So, continuing on my RV setup, i have a little script that gets an LTE signal strength from a mikrotik router, and throws it into MQTT.

I then read this in nymea using the mqtt and write it to a generic thing. Using the pressure thing for this, which works fine…but of course it says “mbar” next to my lte reading =).

Is there a generic thing that wont put a pressure, temp, etc, so we can use it for all sorts of stuff? like a super generic thing? Or to display a string.

Example, a thing that you could pipe the output of a shell script to to display some text. Could be useful for a lot of things.

Also, a thing to monitor a simple yes/no or on/off situation, such as door opened or closed, this or that…etc…would use it for “Internet Detected” in my case. I guess i could have a simple script to publish to MQTT and have it hit a generic switch to show on or off, but thought there might be a cleaner way.

Thinking about it, if we had a single “super generic thing”…it could probably do all of the above?

–John

#2

Well, technically we could probably create such a super generic thing but I don’t think that’s the way to go. Instead, at this point, what you actually want is to dive into plugin development. Given you are quite familiar with how nymea things work, you should probably give that a try. You can define the thing freely as you want, while still making it look good in the ui. Plugins can be created in JavaScript too.

Check out this example here: https://github.com/mzanetti/nymea-plugin-jstest

The documentation: https://nymea.io/documentation/developers/integrations/getting-started-integration

#3

I might just do that, but i think i would want to write a plugin to be that super generic thing, it would be so useful for so many people and so many random things (pardon the pun) they want to do. I just wish i could write one in php or perl, as my other lang skills are marginal.

I continue to be a amazed by the power of nymea, the things i have setup on my system, even just using magic and some command line stuff. Awesome!

–John