iot_devices VS url2epub

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

Somewhat similarly, I wrote a web app to generate epub (instead of pdf) out of urls and send to eink reader(s) directly (via a telegram bot) so I can read them. Currently it supports sending epub by email (for kindle) or uploading epub to dropbox (for kobo, etc.). It originally also supports reMarkable cloud but we can no longer make reMarkable cloud actually work. There's also a REST api to generate epub to be downloaded directly: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub/blob/main/REST.md

For e-ink readers epubs are generally better than PDFs for urls anyways, as epubs are basically packed htmls, and also the flow text works better on smaller screens.

I wrote a service (Google Cloud Run as the backend, with Telegram bot as the frontend) to generate readable ePub from URLs and send directly to e-ink readers. It was originally wrote for reMarkable 2 (using reMarkable cloud), I recently added support for Kindle (by using the send-to-kindle emails). The code is at https://github.com/fishy/url2epub and I blogged about the recently added kindle support at https://b.yuxuan.org/url2epub-kindle.

I'm open to suggestions on what other e-ink platforms to add, as long as they have a reasonable cloud API. I'm also looking for a good e-ink platform to move to personally, as it becomes apparent that reMarkable really doesn't want third parties to use their proprietary cloud "API".

2. It's a relatively open system (compared to other e-ink readers), so it's pretty fun in terms of hackability.

I did get the forever free subscription which helps, but I also totally understand why they would want to charge for that, and I think the new $3/month is a pretty reasonable price for it.

Regarding instapaper use case and also hackability, shameless plug: I wrote https://github.com/fishy/url2epub for my own use case, so instead of relying on a third party service and manually sync stuff to reMarkable 2, I just send the link to the telegram bot (I picked telegram bot so that I can easily send links from my phone, not only desktops), and the epub will be auto synced to my reMarkable cloud account (they did made some changes to the cloud api causing I have to manually open their official mobile or desktop app to sync once before the reMarkable 2 itself would accept the new epub I uploaded through url2epub, haven't figured out how to avoid that yet, but it's still mostly automated).

For reMarkable, I also wrote a Telegram bot to convert http url into ePub and send to reMarkable directly: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub

(if you don't like telegram or don't use reMarkable, it also comes with a public rest API to generate epub out of urls)

Shameless plug and this is only loosely related: Over the last holiday season I wrote a backend (written in Go and running on App Engine) to convert http url into epub. The frontend is a telegram bot that sends the epub to your reMarkable account directly, but it also has rest api to download the epub file: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub/blob/main/REST.md

With the purchase of reMarkable 2, I have this need to easily send web articles to my reMarkable 2 from my phone, while officially they only provided a Chrome extension, which can only be used on desktops.

As a result I wrote some go code (https://github.com/fishy/url2epub) for the past 2 days, to generate ePub from URL. I also implemented reMarkable API to send them to reMarkable tablets directly.

The current UI for it is implemented as a Telegram bot (https://t.me/url2rM_bot?start=1), running on AppEngine (code: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub/tree/main/appengine). I initially considered making an Android app for the UI, but decided that Telegram bot is less work for me, and works good enough for this use case (sorry for people who don't use Telegram, but this also means that people on iOS, desktop, etc. will be able to use it).

For the future, I might do:

- Expand the URLs supported (currently it only supports URLs with an AMP version provided, and the AMP version does have article tag inside)