Hi Home Assistant Community!
So, as this is my first post in this forum bear with me as I’m giving you a little bit of my ideas back-story. You may also skip this paragraph, but I think it’s important to understand the proposal. So I’m a happy Home Assistant User since like 1 1/2 years or so. I also love Tinkering and already have a few Raspberries in my home for certain tasks. (RP Zero for Zigbee2MQTT, RP4 with a Hifiberry for the speakers in my room, another one on my outside-patio, RP2 to control my projector-screen, projector and ambientlight in my living room) Additionally I have my PC and a Media-PC aswell which I also want to control over HomeAssistant/MQTT.
Okay so far so good about my Setup: My issue is now that I want to use the same software to control those Computers and not have to use combinations of different projects. (iotlink, psmqtt, mqtt-launcher, mqtt-exec,…)
I already started on combining the functionality of psmqtt, mqtt-launcher and also added some more services:
- Opening a window (on the remote host) with feedback possibility
- Sending Notifications
- Using the serial port of the remote host (for my projector)
- Using the GPIOs of the Raspberry to control a WS2812-LED Strip with Animations and more cool features
- Home-Assistant MQTT-Auto-Discovery
I named this tool mqttcontroller, but I didnt publish it yet, because the code is kind of a mess. What i did though is using Python with OS-compatiblity in mind therefore I can use this software on my Windows PCs and Raspberries (Debian and Raspbian) alike.
My idea now is to completly refactor my code and publish the Software (as Open Source of course) under the name of:
In addition to the previous mentioned functions it should offer:
- a clean looking web-interface for configuration (so far the different service are configured directly in a config-file)
- a more scalable approach of adding new functionality (maybe even from third-parties) by plugable services
If that works a Custom-Integration or predefined lovelace-cards would also be possible, but one step at a time.
To sum it up IoTether would combine the functionality of at least the following tools:
- IoTLink
- RPi Reporter (for RPi Monitor Card)
- psmqtt
- mqtt-launcher
- mqtt-exec
- Probably even a few more
Now the most important part of this post and my questions to you:
- Does a tool like this already exists? What do you guys use?
- Would somebody else be interested in the proposed functionality? (Otherwise I would not spend so much in time in making it accessible and user-friendly and would probably just continue on developing my personal mqttcontroller mentioned earlier)
- Ideas and thoughts?
Best wishes
ps. I removed the links to the other tools as i can apparently just have a maximum of two in my post, cause I am a new user.