Looking for ideas

Work has been really stressful lately, and im looking for something to work on for the community to take mind off things at my job. I'm looking for some app ideas that aren't well served with the existing apps. Any suggestions?

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Not sure if this is something that could be done through a community app or not but one thing I've been longing for lately is the ability to swap a new device in for an existing device in all apps and rules easily.

For instance, I recently bought a space heater. I have a spare smart plug but it's only rated for 10A. I'd like to take an existing smart plug that is rated for 15A and use it for the space heater and then use the 10A plug where the 15A was. However, the 15A plug is associated with various rule machine rules, dashboards, simple rules, etc. I'll have to go into each of those rules and change the device to the new plug which will take a lot of time.

Similar to how you can clone a Rule Machine rule and swap out a device for a different device, it would be nice to be able to do this for all rules and apps that you want to swap a device out of and a new one in it's place.

Interesting idea, the manual process to do this for zwave devices would be to swap the device network id on each. This would keep everything the same in apps and rules but flip the devices. For ZigBee devices you would probably have to swap the device network id and the ZigBee ID. I haven't tried this on any ZigBee devices but zwave works for sure. I'll take a look and see if this edit can be done in an app.

To do the swap you'll need to use a dummy I'd as a placeholder for the swap.

I probably even have most of the code needed to do this already in one of my other apps where I create virtual devices just need to modify the ids instead of creating a new device.

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I've been meaning to look into this one of these days myself but have kept putting it off so am tossing this out there..

An improved lock code manager - one that can handle more sophisticated reoccurring scheduling like activate a code "every other Tuesday" etc, maybe some other fun stuff as well - similar to RBoys excellent ST app.

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Pretty please?

https://developer.home-connect.com/

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I second this request for Home Connect. Just installed a new Bosch dishwasher and would be great to know if the dishwasher is running to determine if the water should be left on when leaving the house.

My hood is connected. Have a Bosch 800 series dishwasher that isn't connected. Wondering if a vibration sensor would work

There isn't any vibration that I can feel on my 300 (I wanted the 800 but not available in 18" white). I can barely hear this thing run. Maybe a power monitoring wall plug. I have a spare HEM. Maybe I could use that until we get a home-connect integration.

Do you have a vent on the outside that opens/closes? Maybe a contact sensor on it somewhere or wire in a relay?

My 800 is hardwired directly to the breaker panel (but I could probably change that)... Yeah the 800 is quiet AF... The only indication its on is the red laser led on the floor.

I read through some of the home-connect API stuff. I've never done anything with an API before but, since it's open and documented, maybe I can figure it out. Hopefully, I'll have some free time later in the week.

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Wow this is a great tip even if an app doesn't come out of it! Thanks!

In my specific case, I would be switching a z-wave plug for a zigbee plug. Can the swap still be done this way?

Yes, just remember to change the driver.

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After all the recent firmware updates recently, I started to wonder why there isn't an app that would automatically apply a new firmware, send a notification, and reboot the hub. A new version check could be scheduled daily/weekly/monthly at a settable time (say, 3am?) to minimize inconvenience. I'm not even sure about the device-level permissions to pull this off, but I think a lot of people would opt into automatic periodic updates.

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Generally, not a good idea to update automatically since updates can break stuff. With manual updates at least you're aware of the change coming and can make sure you have backups and it wont cause issues if there is a little outtage.

I'm a little more open to automatic security updates if the company has a well proven track record of not breaking stuff.

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Ok, next idea: Automatic hub backups sent to email/Google Drive/local NAS/whatever. I currently use wget in a script on my PC to download a backup every Wednesday, but it requires my PC being on and running it when it could possibly be done all on the hub. Again, scheduled daily/weekly/monthly at a certain time, etc.

Another Community App I would personally be interested in is better integration with WLED.

WLED is firmware you can load on a Node MCU (D1 Mini, ESP 8266, ESP32, etc) to control individually addressable LEDs.

I use it for LEDs in my kids rooms but mainly for the permanent LED strings I have on my house's roof lines. I've managed to put some rules together in Hubitat to turn on the lights a certain color and effect for Halloween, Christmas, etc but a better community app would be awesome.

There is a community driver which allows some interaction with a WLED device but it would be great to have a better integration to have these lights do certain things upon different triggers in Hubitat.

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there are a couple of ways to do that already...

Pulled from the hub or pushed from the hub?

Pulled. You can pull it from an end instance pretty easily. You can do a wget or curl to http://[HubIP]/hub/backupDB?fileName=latest