On Air: Part Two

 

Since my initial foray into developing my own little IoT device that will be controlled by my headset that started in On Air: Part 1, I've managed to accomplish three things:

1. Discovered that the battery drain from the light is too much for as often as I'm on a headset so that batteries would bankrupt me (three batteries lasted two days).  Fortunately, there's a USB C power adapter for this fixture.
2. Rewired the power connection so that it was driven by the power to thee on-off switch, rather than power supply from the battery.
3. Written a couple of node.js scripts to turn the beasty on and off from the command line.

In part 3 or 4 I'll open this thing up to show you my (crappy) wiring.

Step 3 was not nearly as hard as I expected, and that's because everything I need to control the device is right here.

The two scripts are dead simple.  Here's the one to turn it on.  The one to turn it off is left as an exercise for the reader.

const ewelink = require('ewelink-api');

/* instantiate class */

const connection = new ewelink({

  email: '█████████@██████',

  password: '███████████',

  region: 'us',

});

async function f1() {

/* turn on/off device */

const device = await connection.setDevicePowerState('██████████', 'on');

console.log(device);

}

f1();

First, create a connection class, and give it your username (which is your e-mail address), your password, and your region.  Mine happens to be 'us'.

Secondly, create an async function that will turn the device on and report its status.  You'll need the device id, fortunately, it is written on a white sticky attached the controller chip of the device, so get your phone or a magnifying glass to read it, and enter it (in quotes) as the first argument to the call to setDevicePowerState().

Finally, call that function.

To run the script, just enter:

node turnOn.js

at the command line, and walla, the light goes on.  Run

node turnOff.js

and it turns off.

Now, to detect whether my headset is in use, and call the right script.  This will also be remarkably easy.  But the devil is in the details.

I suppose I could simply this script so that it took a command line argument, but again, that's an exercise for the reader.