SDJ-Health Plugin Update to HS4

[The Profit]

Hi Steve,
Do you have any plans to update your Health plugin to HS4? It has been a great plugin that is essential to HS4.
Thank you for considering!

[ksum]

I am running it in HS4. I did not run it in HS3 because I only recently received battery powered units where I needed to track the battery levels. Have yo tried it in HS4?

[SteveMSJ]

Hi Steve,
Do you have any plans to update your Health plugin to HS4? It has been a great plugin that is essential to HS4.
Thank you for considering!

Hi,
Thanks for your kind words.

The fact is that SDJ-Health works perfectly well under HS4, exactly as it does in HS3. I and many others have been using it for many months in HS4 without issue.

Both my released plug-ins required some minor tweaks to cope with some idiosyncrasies in HS4 but I did this during the early alpha/beta stages to ensure continued operation. Whilst I originally intended to update them to new HS4 versions it turned out that the work involved for complex plug-ins is astronomical and the benefits minimal. It was originally suggested that only the user interface would require updating, a big enough task in itself, but it transpired that the HS4 SDK has a whole new API so creating and interacting with devices is completely different. This requires pretty much a complete rewrite of a plug-in despite the fact that the underlying core of HS is not really changed. After dipping into this a few times over the last year I gave up and decided to write a new plug-in as a better learning experience.

I’ve since written an HS4 plug-in for the SurePet devices, which I will probably make available at some point. That was interesting and I do now have a reasonably good understanding of the new HS4 SDK and API. It was like pulling teeth at times, thank heavens for other pi developers who had battled through and shared their findings. There are still a number of bugs to be sorted in the HS4 API which leads to frustrations, although it is getting there.

So, from my experiences with the HS4 SDK I see no point in rewriting SDJ-Health as it works perfectly fine as it is. Ok, so the configuration screens don’t conform to the new Bootstrap gui but they work (better?😉) and anyway once configured how often do you use those pages?

If anybody has any problems or issues running SDJ-Health in HS4 I will certainly address them but so far so good. Perhaps when HS5 comes out a rewrite will be necessary but I suspect not before then.

Whilst HomeSeer were perhaps guilty of understating, considerably, the work involved in updating plug-ins they made a pretty good job of their promise that HS3 plug-ins would still work in HS4. It’s rather telling that the flagship Z-Wave plug-in is still legacy HS3, at least under the hood.

Sorry for the long rant but if you haven’t yet used SDJ-Health in HS4 don’t hold back. There are many of us using it without issue and if you have any problems post in this sub-forum and I will see what I can do.

Steve

[The Profit]

SteveMSJ

Hey Steve, yes, I have been using it in HS4 for a couple of months and I agree that it works just as it did in HS3. I guess my concern was from another post that I read that indicated HS3 plugins would no longer be able to be updated after a certain date. I just noticed that you put out an update so either HS decided against that decision or I misunderstood. This plugin has really been helpful and I would be disappointed to lose it's functionality.

[SteveMSJ]

SteveMSJ

Hey Steve, yes, I have been using it in HS4 for a couple of months and I agree that it works just as it did in HS3. I guess my concern was from another post that I read that indicated HS3 plugins would no longer be able to be updated after a certain date. I just noticed that you put out an update so either HS decided against that decision or I misunderstood. This plugin has really been helpful and I would be disappointed to lose it's functionality.

There is no problem with updating existing legacy plug-ins. The only restriction is that HS doesn’t accept any NEW HS3 plug-ins to the store. All new plug-ins must be HS4, which is understandable.

No need to panic, existing legacy plug-ins will be around, and maintained, for a long time🙂

Steve

[DLONG2]

Curious how to use the SDJ-Health plugin. I see a new device named "Battery Health" and am wondering how I can get push notifications whenever any sensor's battery is lower than say 20%. Looked briefly in trying to build an event, and I can have an event notify me on an individual sensor's battery level, but am unsure if that was present before the plug in, or if there's a more elegant way of getting battery level info?

Update: Ah, I see I had to select the battery devices first in the plugin. Cool!

[SteveMSJ]

Curious how to use the SDJ-Health plugin. I see a new device named "Battery Health" and am wondering how I can get push notifications whenever any sensor's battery is lower than say 20%. Looked briefly in trying to build an event, and I can have an event notify me on an individual sensor's battery level, but am unsure if that was present before the plug in, or if there's a more elegant way of getting battery level info?

Update: Ah, I see I had to select the battery devices first in the plugin. Cool!

Have you seen the guide?
https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/ul...j/104921-guide

Steve