Experimental: homie extension

[rtreffer]

This is a highly experimental initial homie extension. Status is best summarized as "it does something since today".

Status in conjunction with the new OpenHab 2.4 MQTT binding

• Adding/discovering devices
• Controlling an RGB IKEA lamp
• Deregister devices when zigbee2mqtt goes offline
• Endpoints
• Testing (automatic and other controllers than OpenHab)
• Bridge Config (e.g. permit_join....)
  and probably a lot more.... My JavaScript knowledge is pretty outdated I guess.

There are also a few places where a lot of code was duplicated...

• Finds/calls fromZigbee to generate the payload, duplicating the normal publishing logic.... It would be great if it would be possible to write extensions that interact with the fully fledged messages.
• RGB / XYZ conversions.... The current methods don't seem to do full brightness computation. But as homie only allows RGB/HSV there needed to be a brightness-adjusting version. This should probably go into utils
• Full round-trip of OpenHab -> MQTT -> Zigbee2Mqtt -> Zigbee device -> Zigbee2Mqtt -> MQTT -> OpenHab is slow, causing some lag and jumping
• My OpenHab MQTT binding was old, so I had to publish everything in $stats every interval seconds. This is a OpenHab thing that's fixed upstream

I'll probably converge to this at home and would try to get it into a usable state because the new OpenHab MQTT binding is great and the whole structure seems so much easier than HomeAssistant (and the OpenHab HomeAssistant discovery failed for me....)

[niecore]

Great Idea to integrate with Homie.

Just asking why to not use existing libraries to implement the convention?

For instance.:
https://github.com/microclimates/homie-device

[rtreffer]

Oh, good question, the main factors were: 1. Zigbee2Mqtt already has a MQTT connection + publishing/subscribing capabilities 2. I didn't know if I would want to go map the network onto one device with many nodes or many devices with one node. I still don't know the right answer, I think this should be a question on the homie convention issue tracker. I just know that n devices seem to work better with openhab. 3. I was mainly interested in openhab as a target controller, and there are bugs in the stable mqtt release (fixed in HEAD as far as I can tell) I think my priorities to simplify this PR would be 1. Ask for a spec clarification for bridges/gateways 2. Add machine-readable device descriptions to shepard 3. Extend extensions interface to act on the prepared full MQTT messages and expose the JSON command handling directly 4. Get some of the helper functions in (especially RGB<->XY+B) 5. Add a homie lib and expose all additional settings (toggle permit_join, rename devices, ...) The selling point of homie is simplicity. It was simple to implement. I would expect a library to help me to expose more settings and simplify e.g. the rename of a device, but I'd rather try to get the basics sorted out, that looks like the hard work. Am Mo., 21. Jan. 2019, 18:01 hat Nico Müller <notifications@github.com> geschrieben:

…

Great Idea to integrate with Homie. Just asking why to not use existing libraries to implement the convention? For instance.: https://github.com/microclimates/homie-device — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#855 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AADvelPmasPdqxeU2hmmn1BDx9AOfAliks5vFfJggaJpZM4Z9bF8> .

[Rexz34]

Does anyone know the current implementation of the homie extension? Is it in the latest build?

[tavalin]

@rtreffer I just tried this out with openHAB and would like to say keep up the effort! I haven't had a chance to do any extensive testing but it was certainly refreshing to see my Xiaomi sensors be automatically discovered and added to the inbox with it automatically knowing what channels/features are present on the sensors 👍

[tavalin]

@rtreffer can we progress this? I think this will be a useful feature so I'm keen to help where I can.

[tavalin]

Or @Koenkk...any ideas how we can progress this?

[Koenkk]

Before I can merge such code:

• It needs to be clean and maintainable
• Tests should be written
• Documentation should be written

[rtreffer]

@Koenkk what would you think about extracting the metadata from lib/extension/homeassistant.js? There is a 80-90% overlap of what this extension and homeassistant need to operate.

Everything else is very clean, this was an early shot at "can this be done at all"

[Koenkk]

@rtreffer yes, feel free to move that to a different file, so both can use it.

[tavalin]

Has there been any progress on this? What is outstanding before this can be merged?

[tavalin]

Ping @rtreffer @Koenkk

[Koenkk]

@tavalin there is still a todo list in the OP, also, tests need to be added before I can merge this.

[Koenkk]

I will close this PR for now, the current codebase drifted too much away from this PR.