I'm a newbie here. Please excuse my ignorance but what is oAuth2 and do I need it to use HomeSeer?
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No you do not need it to use HS4. -
Yes, that is correct you don't need oAuth2 to use HS4. Let me explain what oAuth2 is about.
If you're old enough you'd remember that anything you buy for home from toaster to TV and everything in between came with a "Registration card" . You were supposed to fill it and mail it back as a way for the vendor to keep track and follow up with their clients.
Vendors would threat that product loses warranty if registration card is not sent back, although this could've been illegal since I've never mailed one and I was never refused warranty on this fact alone.
Today's threat is more real. If you do not register online than you lose the opportunity to control your device with an app or integrate it in your home automation such as HomeSeer for example.
You're getting a secret "token" after you register your product online. This token is your key to unlock all of the related apps to control your device or get information about it.
The token is hidden in your smart phone or your computer and it is invisible to you if you would use the apps that come with your device. All you see and use is your username and password, the rest happens automatically behind the scene for you and it is hidden within the app.
Things change when you want to integrate your device with HomeSeer to bring everything under one platform. In such case you will need the API of your device. Some APIs are published by vendors and others are not most often hacked by enthusiasts and published by them.
9 out of 10 cases of modern API use "token" to authorize any action or report.
oAuth2 is the process of obtaining such token.
It is not a rocket science to obtain an oAuth2 token and it is normally explained in the API description. Many Big5 users have done this successfully. Big5's legacy version as well as the new version are both good for it with their extensive HTML tools.
Unfortunately some vendors make their token expire after certain time. It expired within 30 seconds in extreme cases that I've seen . Fortunately, such extreme cases are rarity but even if token expires in a week it is burdensome to go trough the manual oAuth2 process and get new token each time.
This is where the new feature of Big5 kicks in available in the latest version of Big5 for HS4. Big5 will retrieve the token for you automatically and store it in HS4 for use in the API.
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