Looking for recommendations on building a Litetouch plugin

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1

I built this plugin for Vera:

I'm looking to port it to Hubitat. However, there are a couple of things that may influence how I build it. The way I see it, I have 2 options:

  1. Plugin supports making commands over the serial port via an ethernet->serial converter (probably a pi zero w with a usb->serial dongle and socat)
  2. Implement a REST API on the pi zero, and make the HE plugin talk to the REST API.

The controller I have now supports the Litetouch 2000 protocol, which doesn't provide for notifications of changes over the serial port. If someone turns on a light via the keypad, I have to poll for it to see what its status is. And, if I poll too quickly, the data coming back comes back out of order. The result is that the current Vera plugin has a circular queue of all of the loads and it polls one every 2 seconds and updates the status in the Vera. In any case, since my current LiteTouch controller doesn't notify, a REST interface would be fine.

However, I also have a newer Litetouch controller called a 5000LC. The 5000LC supports a newer protocol (over serial) that does have status change notifications. I'm guessing that if I do a REST API when I eventually make a plugin for the newer controller, I will possibly have problems getting immediate notification of load status changes and I'll still have to do polling.

Any thoughts on this?

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Also, I'm just reading some of the documentation. It appears I need to create a "driver" in HE to support this.

The controller I have now doesn't have anything in it that allows for discovery of configured loads. So, in Vera, when I install the plugin I configure it with a field that lists the load ID's of dimmers, and another field that lists the load ID's of on/off switches. When the plugin starts, it automatically creates the devices in Vera for me, and I can go through and name them all and control them.

In HE, do drivers have the capability to take this list of load ID's and automatically create devices? Or, do I have to manually create each device on the devices page? I have 48 devices that will need to be created, so being able to do it via a list of load ID's on the controller would be ideal.

3

Hubitat drivers are written in Groovy. It does not appear that any of this is written in the correct language to be able to be used with Hubitat.

4

I know, I'm going to port it to groovy.

Just looking for some info before I tackle it.