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.


8 comments:

  1. Hi. Nice feature ! is it possible to add google hangout support also ?

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  2. Google Talk have actually been using XMPP as communication protocol. Unfortunately they have decided to go for a proprietary protocol now. I will probably not add support for that protocol, but I expect there will be bridge services so you can access it via XMPP anyway.

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  3. Hello! Very nice feature that I've been waiting for.
    But I can't get it to work on my Raspberry.
    I can see the message-event in the event-log and no other error messages, but no message are delivered.
    The xmpp-client is "authenticated", but my guess is that it never recieves the message event.
    Is there some way to troubleshoot?
    It would also be helpful if the wiki describes the xmpp-client.

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  4. Hi, seems like hue discover is broken in both 2.0 and nightly.

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  5. @Fredrik: I have been a bit sloppy with wiki documentation on the Items that are not released yet... The problem is probably that the address in the message has to have a protocol prefix, so if the address of the recipient is opennethome@jabber.de, then the To-field should be: xmpp:opennethome@jabber.de This is to prepare for other message gateways in the future.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you! Now it is working perfectly :)
      I had a similar problem a while ago when choosing delivery method for notifications from my weather station. I then used twitter. It was a great solution because I could use "mention" to send messages directly to my Iphone-app.
      But xmpp look like a great solution as well!

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  6. @Anonymous: It is broken in the release since Philips changed the URL. I just tried it in the nightly, and it seems to work. If you press the "findBridge"-link, it should find your local bridge address. Send me a mail if it still does not work, so can I help sorting it out.

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  7. Seems to work now, thx! :)
    Tommy Jørgensen

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