Domoticz

Hi - looking at the possibility of developing a plugin for the Blink Home Monitoring Camera's - there's a couple of libraries out there (a python one - unfortunately it depends heavily on the requests module so I can't just use that) There is also good docs on driving Blink via curl, so between the two sources I think I have enough info.

For now, my needs are simple - I just want to be able to ARM/DISARM the motion sense on a camera - I could do this via a separate python script - calling the library / requests - but I am sure I will want to build on it so am tempted to go down the plugin route.

I am however struggling with the Domoticz.Connection and subsequent sends - I can't get the syntax correct to produce the required "packet"

The curl command to emulate is (for authentication - you get an auth token returned to use in the next calls)

curl -H "Host: prod.immedia-semi.com" -H "Content-Type: application/json" --data-binary '{ "password" : "your blink password", "client_specifier" : "iPhone 9.2 | 2.2 | 222", "email" : "your blink login/email" }' --compressed https://rest.prod.immedia-semi.com/login

I have tried both an HTTPS and JSON protocol

Any suggestions?

For reference on the work done so far by others:

https://github.com/MattTW/BlinkMonitorProtocol
https://github.com/fronzbot/blinkpy

hi @malarcy,

in Plugin Framework you can always use urrlib; but that means not using the native plugin framework connections. It will work anyway.

If you are using native TCP-IP/HTTP connection, you have to send a header; check https://github.com/domoticz/domoticz/bl ... es/HTTP.py for an example.

Or if you are using TCP-IP/JSON or TCP-IP/None connection, you have to deal with raw incoming HTTP messages. What i did for a connection in the plugin is like: and use 'Connection.Send(self.wsHeader)' in onconnect. Please be aware that this header is for a websocket connection, you have to correct it according to your needs. You have to convert '{ "password" : "your blink password", "client_specifier" : "iPhone 9.2 | 2.2 | 222", "email" : "your blink login/email" }' to binary before putting it in to your header. Also i believe it should be POST, not GET on your situation.

"Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate\r\n" \ wll handle the compressed option.

Thanks for the quick response and the pointers - some more options there - if I can use the framework I will - if not - will fall back to urllib (or probably urllib2 for the flexibility)

In the case of the HTTP.py example - I see the header getting constructed - thats useful.

The auth sequence is a POST (you are correct), its JSON, I would need to specify that as a "body" section of the send (assuming that can be done).

More playing later on today

Malarcy

@malarcy:

Check https://github.com/domoticz/domoticz/bl ... istener.py for a POST example; which uses:
, so you can send body section in 'Data'

OK - got it authenticating and I can read back the token etc. via the framework - thanks for the help on that - found that if I didn't tell the server I would accept gzipped content then it returns uncompressed - how very civil of it - will need to deal with gzip'ed content if I got as far as retrieving thumbnails or videos from the cloud service.

Now looking at the logic in the onMessage section - there's a fair amount of "discovery" that needs to go on at startup - and I would kind of like to handle all that in the onConnect - is there anyway of specifying a different call back handler for a given "send" - if not I guess I just need to parse out the setup and discovery (enumeration of cameras, etc.) - just makes that piece of code heavier than I would like.

In normal running the onMessage handler will be perfect for dealing with periodic status refreshes and response to commands.

More experimentation later.

Malarcy

@malarcy,

Most devices have an element of 'discovery' to them, previously I have triggered the discovery in the onConnect then used the responses as a 'state machine' to drive next steps.

Have a look at:

• https://github.com/dnpwwo/Domoticz-RAVEn-Plugin this goes through a number of steps to confirm configuration post connection.
• https://github.com/dnpwwo/Domoticz-GlobalCache-Plugin has a completely separate 'discovery' cycle that uses a different protocol

its an easy approach an quite robust to handle cases where remote devices become unavailable and disconnect followed by reconnection.