Pull a web based thermostat controller into Hubitat

🚧 Developers
1

Hello all,

I've had my Hubitat for close to a year but haven't yet done any development on it yet, I finally have the time and ready to dive into the project.

Some background:
I'm part of a pilot program with my power company. They are able to control my A/C based on my grid demand. This is an interface that I must keep up in order to stay on the power plan and thus has pigeon holed me into using there system which does not have ports to any home automation system. At present time the only way to control the a/c is via the interface on the thermostat or their web/app. I've already written some code to drive commands to their website and able control the thermostat from my desktop. Their website is in java script and I do not have enough domain knowledge to reverse engineer their site to drive commands efficiently thus I'm running Selenium Webdriver, to control the thermostat.

What I would like to do is pull what I have into the Hubitat eco system and have an Echo or Google Home control the thermostat via voice commands. I'm looking for suggestions and ideas of how to accomplish this.

Ideas I've had so far is to run my code to control the thermostat on a Raspberry Pi. I would write sockets to pass controls between my Pi and the Hubitat. I'm a bit miffed on where to start on the Hubitat side, such as should I build a "device", app, driver, or something else entirely? I'm just starting on this and am open to ANY suggestions.

Thanks,

2

Hi @jwardwell7077,

I'm currently writing a driver for my air con as well, though I have a different situation where I have an web-hosted API I can call via HTTP. While I'm fairly new at this, my suggestion would be to develop your code in hubitat as a device driver, but would also suggest getting input from other developers. The reason I took this path is it allows me to incorporate my air con into other apps or features that can interact with devices with the relevant capabilities, such as dashboard tiles and scheduling apps or rules.

In terns if the integration between hubitat and the air con app / api, and interaction with voice assistants, I'm probably not the best to answer. If you need assistance constructing any http calls I'd be happy to help out.

Simon

3

The first question is, does the Thermostat have a publicly accessible API? Is that API documented? If the answer to either of those questions is "no" then you are pretty much out of luck. You'd have to sniff the commands coming out of the app in order to control the thermostat. That is going to be too complicated to be a realistic thing to accomplish.