New integration component - make HA to support my smart home system

Hi there,
This is my first post in this community, so saying hi everyone :wink:

Recently I’ve read about Home Assistant and after checking a few things - I’m delighted with this software.
I own a very simple smart home system, which is quite a limited solution and so I’d like to extend its capabilities and make it working with Home Assistant.
The system is composed of small “bricks” that control typical devices like roller blinders, on/off devices for lights and anything else and of course a controller that manages everything and is a gate between an app and the components. It’s a radio-based system working on ISM band 868 MHz.
It’s possible to control it via a mobile app which connects to the controller via TCP and sends simple JSON-based commands. I’ve analysed the communication, so I’m already able to “talk” to the controller via TCP.
Thus I think it is enough to start integrating this with Home Assistant )but correct me if I’m wrong :slight_smile:

One important thing: the system is nto able to report its status changes. They are only known in the current app when the app is about to display a list of controllers with their statuses on screen. I hope this doesn’t complicate things dramatically. And I hope there is a way to do it in a similar wat in Home Assistand - e.g. to refresh states manually or before displaying controls or poll their statuses periodically. Moreover device statuses can change due to their local control via wall switches or remote radio controls assigned to them. The system does not report remote status change to the controller. The status is read right before displaying a device in app.

Now - I am totally new to the development for Home Assistant so I’d really appreciate you guys to answer the following questions:

  1. How to start? How would you recommend to approach this integration development? Is there already an existing component that I could use as a basis for my work or should I start from scratch?

  2. Is it possible to install Home Assistant in Docker (I own a Synology NAS with Docker support) AND put my new development in it?

I’d really appreciate your input. I’m really hoping this task is doable and I’d love to have my system integrated with HA.

Thanks in advance,
Greg

I can’t help with your development questions, but installing on Synology using docker is described here

Does your system have a name? Maybe someone already has created some Python wrapper library to interact with it. That would prevent you from reinventing the wheel.
The next step would be to find a similar integration that already exists in Home Assistant. If I understand correctly, there is a hub-device with which you can communicate. It doesn’t push state changes, so your Home Assistant implementation should probably poll at least every minute what the current state is. The Wink component seems to be a bit similar, as it also polls the states periodically. So maybe take a look at that and see how your system compares to it.

A development environment in Docker is doable. But I personally feel it’s less of a pain doing development in a dedicated VM that’s bridged into your network. But that’s up to personal taste. In general it’s also possible.

Hi there,
Yes, it has a name: “Exta Life” by company ZAMEL. I didn’t find any wrapper for it. As I said - it’s a very, very niche product available on a limited set of markets. So I guess I’d have to make a support for it by myself.

Thanks for all the tips and guidance. I’ll check the WInk component.