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by pmontra 898 days ago
I've got some Shelly Plugs. I decided to operate them with a self made web app running on my home server. That app makes HTTP calls to the API of the plug. It's very simple, just a curl from bash would work. One call to turn on the plug, one to turn it off and one to read the power meter. I put buttons on the web page and it does what I need.

There are no dependecies from other services and especially no dependency from Amazon or Google (the plugs work with them too.) Given the size of the web app maybe it also spared me some time because I suspect that installing, configuring Home Assistant and learning how to use it and what works and what doesn't are not zero time activities.

2 comments

I don't myself but I know that many use Node-RED[0] for home assistant applications. It comes with thousands of plugins, easy to construct web frontends and it's completely open source.

I believe one can also combine it with Home Assistant, I think there are interfaces.

Learning curve is initial exponential (think of visual Unix pipes) but once understood, there are limitless things that you can do with Node-RED. It's basically a visual programming frontend to NodeJS.

[0] https://nodered.org

This is what use for my home automations, including some Shelly 1s. It's pretty neat.
That's just some silly scripting GUI, isn't it?

No real reason to write code in blocks when you know how to not do that.

I have an express server that runs my automations using the REST API.

Yeah, one of these days I expect to set up homeassistant, and even recommend it to others, but I'm happy driving my shelly plugs with bash+curl from a streamdeckui entry for now :-)