oliver2213

I'm working on a personal hobby project of mine, written in MOO [0] of all things. Its a bridge to homeassistant - it connects to your local instance and lets you observe and control anything you have set up in homeassistant from within the MOO - toggle lights, set thermostats, send tts alerts, etc. It also receives state change events, so you can have objects that act like their real counterparts and display up-to-date information as long as the bridge is online. I run a local house MOO for my roomates and myself, and I thought it would be fun to control my smart home from it. Challenges... The first was reading the web socket rfc and writing my own implementation, in what is probably considered an esoteric language at this point. Next was discovering just how much of home assistant's web socket API is undocumented (read: pretty much all of it). There's a page which mentions a handful of APIs, and this got me started, but I really had to start reading homeassistant's code to see what other commands were available and being used presumably by the front-end to do some of what I wanted (listing users, subscribing to state updates for specific entities, listing areas, devices, etc)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO

From what I've read, apple and google appear to be working on rolling out APIs for contact tracing on their platforms, and apps you explicitly install are supposedly just the first stage, with later in-platform functionality presumably to come with regular OS updates. So It might not always be a deliberate choice made by users in the future, for good or ill.

I really like the idea, but the time frame of when the protocol will be "complete" seems (as noted by other commenters here and by the fact that it looks to have been posted in 2013) a bit sketchy. Still, I'm seriously thinking about making server / client libraries for myself and others so this is less of "Here's this really cool idea and a few sort-of complete implementations", and more "Here's this really cool idea, and here's how you can integrate it into your sites if you want".

I would love this! Already have a Debian 8 server and (although I want to use this) don't feel like spinning up a new server for MiaB.

I use a cheap $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet with nginx, Nikola [0], and letsencrypt for ssl. Works great and I can expand easily if I want to add php or other wsgi apps.

[0] https://getnikola.com

Definitely not as awesome as some of the others I've seen posted here :), but I made https://github.com/oliver2213/showerthoughtMOTD to spice up my message of the day on servers I log into. Usually makes me laugh and occasionally makes me contemplate things I normally wouldn't think about.