Can I create child devices from a driver?

🚧 Developers
1

I'm using the Elk driver as a template for this. The Elk driver has an associated app that creates the child devices. I'd like to avoid the app altogether and just create the devices when I set up the driver.

Looking at using this for inputs:

preferences {
	input("ip", "text", title: "IP Address", description: "ip", required: true)
	input("port", "text", title: "Port", description: "port", required: true)
	input("switches", "text", title: "Switches", description "e.g. 01-1,01-2,02-A", required: true)
	input("dimmers", "text", title: "Dimmers", description "e.g. 03-1,03-2,04-A", required: true)
}

When I save these settings, can I have the driver create all of these child devices? Or do I still have to do it via an app? If I can do it in the driver, if I make a modification to the switches or dimmers list, can it delete or create devices as needed?

2

You can get some code ideas from this thread..

Andy

3

What I'm trying to do is to rewrite this driver for Vera (written in LUA) to Hubitat.

I wrote this like 6 years ago. It's a basic integration that talks over a serial port. With Hubitat, I can't hook up a USB->serial converter. So, I have an ethernet->serial converter sitting here doing nothing right now. I think I have the connection part of the driver figured out using the telnet method used in the Elk driver.

There are a couple of interesting things for this driver:

  1. The device does not send unsolicited updates over the serial port. This means that if someone changes a light via a keypad, the HE won't know unless I poll for it. If I blast the polling message for all 48 loads, the results come back out of order. So, in the LUA code, I implemented a circular queue that polls one device after another every 2 seconds. And if an update happens from the HA system, it inserts the poll for that one device at the top of the queue as a priority poll to ensure that it updated on the lighting controller. I still need to do this in the groovy code. It's not ideal, but it works.
  2. One thing I did not implement was a queue for sending commands to the unit. Right now, the vera will send all the commands quickly for a scene, and the controller doesn't pick them all up. Sometimes I need to run the scene multiple times to get all the lighting loads to update. I'll need to implement a command queue that has a delay between each command. Planning on 500ms to see if that works, and I'll raise it if needed.
  3. Dimmer levels on the controller are 0-255. In order to make this compatible with percentages, I do some math in LUA to make it work. I need to do the same thing here. Also, my LUA code does not support ramp rates, however, the controller does. So I want to implement this as well.

@cobra, I didn't see a link to the code you posted above. Do you have a link to it?

Also, any tips anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated. I've never done anything w/ groovy before.

4

The top line written in blue is a link

5

Ah sorry, it seems it was a couple links deep. Thank you!