iot_devices VS edn

Wow, what a great idea for a thread!

I'm trying to pare down my personal projects to just the really exciting ones, so I don't have much, butni think the most appropriate to the thread is https://github.com/EternityForest/iot_devices

It's mean to be a cross-framework library for creating device integrations, so you can, say, write a handler for RTL SDR weather stations, and use it in a simple script up to a mega framework.

I kind of dislike the way HASS and others handle automations where they have special purpose primitives for everything that needs lots of hand written code.

I just have config entries, they must be strings, and data points, they can be strings, numbers, bytes, or objects. You can put metadata on them. There's also a few other utilities like the ability to make subdevices, and the ability to request things from the host.

There are no special subclasses, a light bulb is just a device with a brightness point.

It currently runs my security system with object detection recording, QR decoding if desired, multiple regions, motion detection without decoding every frame, and subsecond latency streaming to the browser, a nice recordings browser that can view a recording while it's being made, etc.

My HA platform project started in 2013. Every few months or so I check back to see if HA has progressed far enough that I can ditch one of the last custom apps in my life.

It's getting there. But it's not quite there yet. Last I checked the logging still saves every change, it's not easy to set up so that it will only save average/min/max over time to save SD wear.

Creating new integrations is easy but still not quite a five minute job like it is with my extension API(https://github.com/EternityForest/iot_devices)

But yet, having custom software in one's life is generally IMHO far more of a liability than an asset.

So what I actually do is just use YoLink and Google assistant for everything I possibly can, and use custom software for video recording and unusual stuff YoLink doesn't do.

I'd love to have a one size fits all "If it need automating, use this" platform, and HA seems like it's got the potential.... but just using the YoLink proprietary platform is the lazy, trouble free, super cheap way.

I'm working on a standard for easy drop-in home IoT drivers: https://github.com/EternityForest/iot_devices

Maybe you could go one level of meta up and instead of working on reusable components, work on reusable definitions for component interfaces.

Reuse is hard because you need a bunch of glue code. But if you had, like a standard for a toolbar, that knew how to find all the ToolbarAble objects, and the shopping cart icon just showed up, etc, things would get easier.

The shopping cart could know to look for all the payment requesting components declared in your Big Project File or whatever, and everything could stay modular ish?

GitHub is already the standard place to share generic projects.

Source code can be found here: https://github.com/EternityForest/iot_devices

> was utterly surprised how no one ever apparently has thought to create a configuration/templating system that's basically a fancy library on top of Scheme.

There's Clojure's extensible data notation: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

A thin language layer around edn/datalog, the query language

EDN (Extensible Data Notation) is a subset of Clojure: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

It is:

- Streamable

- Extensible

- Whitespace-insensitive, but there are formatting conventions for readability

To begin with, EDN is somewhat like the JSON of Clojure. And regarding the code is data/data is code nature of Clojure, it is Clojure. It doesn't have some of the vagaries of JSON, and it is also extensible.

Alien is not a reason something is bad, just that's it's unusual. JSON was a bit alien when it first arrived as well, as everyone was used to XML at the time.

`{num 5, val 4}` looks fine to me, but we can do even better! We already know objects/maps are always in pairs, so we don't really need that comma either. Just do `{num 5 val 4}` and we save yet another unnecessary characters.

Of course, I didn't come up with this format myself, what I actually want JSON to be is EDN (https://github.com/edn-format/edn) which is a standalone format but also directly used in Clojure, so it already exists inside a programming language and works very well. There keys are strings though, so you example would end up being `{"num" 5 "val" 5 "person" var}`, where commas are optional.

I just checked out the spec, and it gets pretty ugly in the Table section. A lot of the json examples are both shorter and IMO more precise. Stuff that’s not allowed with [table] is allowed with [[table]], and it’s confusing to understand what level of depth I’m at.

I’ll take edn over any of “em. https://github.com/edn-format/edn

As XT is written in Clojure and it natively supports Clojure’s data types, we were not satisfied with available JSON types and decided to give EDN a try - that way we would have way more supported types:

Compare the nightmare that is pickling with how simple it is to serialize pure data with edn in clojure. What ends up happening is people passing around JSONs or whatever and writing parsing/encoding code at each end, which makes things unnecessarily more complex, and dangerous, and error prone, and boring, etc...