search

stjohnjohnson / smartthings-mqtt-bridge

Bridge between SmartThings and MQTT
https://hub.docker.com/r/stjohnjohnson/smartthings-mqtt-bridge/
MIT License
363 stars 241 forks source link

Supporting optional setStatus command for the music player capability #82

Closed airdrummingfool closed 7 years ago

airdrummingfool commented 7 years ago

Hello, First, thanks for this awesome project. I'm using it to abstract away the SmartThings<->device interface in new devices I'm creating, so I can just create virtual devices and control them via MQTT (which is easier to interface with than sending HTTP requests to a ST Hub).

My current project is a virtual audio device (capability: musicPlayer) designed to control snapcast clients. Thanks to this project, hooking up mute/unmute and volume controls was simple. However, after some struggling I figured out that there was no way to pass status from MQTT back to the ST device. On the surface, this makes sense - status comes from the player itself, so it shouldn't be externally controllable. However, in the case of virtual devices, the actual audio control is happening somewhere else, and the ST device is just a representation of that state. To allow for this, I made a very small modification to the MQTT Bridge SmartApp so that it passes status messages back to the device, only if setStatus is declared as a command.

This benefits me because I now have a sensible place to provide online/offline status of each client, but I can see this being useful for anyone implementing a virtual media player wanting to pass status messages (or even play/pause/stop events) to ST devices.

I realize this may be a bit of an off-spec change, so I understand if it's not appropriate for this project. Thanks again!

stjohnjohnson commented 7 years ago

Howdy @airdrummingfool!

Snapcast sounds awesome. I might look into getting that setup in my house.

This PR looks quite reasonable. I like your approach to checking if the method is there. Maybe I can abstract that so regardless of content coming in (like level or status), it will check if there is first a predefined way to handle it (like mute has mute() and unmute()) otherwise it will scan the object if there is a set method available and call it.

But for now, 👍

airdrummingfool commented 7 years ago

@stjohnjohnson thank you! I like the idea of looking for a set___ method for any attributes that aren't otherwise handled.