LoxBuddy App - looking for interest in a community driven App development

[nufke]

As already announced in another forum thread, I am working on an web-based App called LoxBuddy. More info (and screenshots) can be found on GitHub.
The app is in pre-alpha phase, so immature, unstable and incomplete, but the good news is that the first parts are starting to work. Currently there is only a development platform, there is no ready-to-use (docker) image available yet. But this is planned as soon as the basics are working.

If you are interested to join the App development, or if you have specific requirements or ideas beyond what we can do with the original app, just let me know or create an issue in GitHub.

Looking forward for your inputs and perhaps we can drive this development as a true loxforum community effort.

[Grestorn]

This looks like a fantastic project; however, I'm not quite clear what you want to achieve. Is this meant to replace the official app? And if so, what is the motivation? General unhappiness with the official App?

I'm asking because it's a major difference whether you want to add functionality that is not covered by the official tools or if you wish to replace them, because you're not happy with the official UI.

[nufke]

Very good point, as defining the goals and objectives of the App should be part of of the community discussion as well

My main motivation to start all this was to support a better and broader integration of devices, technologies and/or APIs into a single user interface. Many devices available today are MQTT based or have another web-based API, so why not doing this integration directly into our own App?

Obviously the next question then becomes, if you like to integrate "everything", why not using Home Assistant? The answer is rather simple: I have an existing infrastructure centered around Loxone, with extensions such as LoxBerry, Node-red, etc. So I'd like to reuse my existing configuration (incl menu structure) from Loxone Config (and LoxBerry) as-is, and not redo the entire integration in HA. This means the baseline is to try to implement all existing controls and capabilities, and in parallel add new controls and extensions.

I am not confident that the integration capabilities and performance I expect will be every supported in the official App. Furthermore, discussions in this forum revealed many issue, difficulties and inconsistencies in the official App, so instead of waiting for a fix/update, I think it is about time we drive this development as a community effort.

[Jan W.]

I really like the project and it would be nice to add some Loxberry monitoring (or even configuration) into the app in the future. From time to time I'm really frustrated about the official Loxone app, especially when Loxone has decided to make some major (or minor) changes that breaks some functionality. Here are two examples:

• two times an update has broken the functionality that the popup picture of the intercom is not stopped after some time
• the new app 16.2 does not display any custom SVG symbols anymore that I had added before, see here.

I would be happy if Loxone creates a new app name for major "improvements", e.g. a new Loxone v16.2 app, but they want to have ONE app only and force everybody to use that one. I don't need any Carplay functionality for my ipads at home, but I really liked the symbols that I have added. Of course you could argue that it's my fault because the official way to add your own symbols is to use PNG format - even if they look ugly. In my opinion Loxone spends a lot of time to include features that helps them to sell hardware, but they don't listen to the community. A way to add your own symbols in SVG format that have the same quality as the symbols provided by Loxone is a feature that is on the list for years.

I know that you could stop updating any apps in iOS, but that's not really practical. AFAIK there is no option to stop updates for a single app. With almost all other apps I like the update feature, because newer version work better and bugs were removed.

I'm not sure if it is a good idea to grab values directly from devices, because polling is creating a lot of traffic. With MQTT for example only changes are send from the device. It would be difficult for mobile devices (phones, tablets) to register for updates, because the appear and disappear in the local network and may also change their IP address. As a first milestone I would like to have a similar functionality as the official app.

I'm looking forward to test and use that app!

[nufke]

Yes, some level of LoxBerry monitoring/confuguration (e.g. for plugins) is on my wish-list as well, but we might need to think first which capabilities are required and which interface to use for this (MQTT, HTTP/REST, ...).

The recent icon (color) issues with the official app, and the lack of seamless SVG integration for many years, is another good reason why I like to have my own App. In fact, I am currently working on the complete replacement/remapping of the IconLibrary towards an fully open-source icon equivalent. This is also required to be able to run LoxBuddy completely independent from any Loxone library.

The intercom popup picture closure should be a simple thing to implement (i.e. return after timeout). The current intercom in LoxBuddy already shows video streams, but I did not implement the SIP client yet for voice communication.

I am aware of the communication overhead when polling for information, so this approach is only used occasionally, e.g. to grab weather info (each 5 minutes) or getting the trash-pick-up calendar (once per day, during the night). The rest of the communication is planned over WebSocket or MQTT.
I will take care that the performance and usability remains good