2014-11-09

Nethome Sending Messages

Nethome now have the ability to send messages! I have been wanting to add this for quite some time, but now it is done. I have been looking at a number of ways of communication, but I finally chose XMPP (Jabber). First I looked at ordinary mail, but messages from Nethome would typically be more of real time messages. Then I looked at SMS, but the problem is that you need to have payed accounts to have reliable service for that. XMPP is an instant messaging protocol, and there are a number of free XMPP (Jabber) servers available where you can get an account. There are also a number of clients for IPhone and Android. Messages pop up in your phone just like SMS (provided that you have internet connection).

There are two new Items added for this: XmppClient, which has the configuration for the connection to the server and Message which holds a message and has the send-action.

The message text may refer to attribute values of other Home Items, so the text in the picture above is really: "Freezer is too warm, currently at ${Freezer.Temperature} degrees"

I am using the excellent Babbler-library by Christian Schudt for the xmpp-communication.

So all you need to do is to create one account for your Nethome-server and one account for yourself at one of the jabber servers and then your nethome server can start sending messages to you.