Having released Patriot iOS and Alexa Smart Home skills, it’s time to get back to improving and extending the Particle.io Photon code. One of the obvious deficiencies with the existing code is that it requires that device support be built into the library. This is fast and really convenient if you just happen to want to use the included devices, but sucks if you have other devices you want to use. It’s all open sourced, so anyone can modify it however they’d like, but that sort of misses the whole point of Patriot: to allow hobbyists to focus on solving problems and not on how to build all the components. And the code is getting fairly complex, so it’s not a trivial task.
I’ve been thinking for awhile now that I’d need to add some sort of plug-in capability to greatly simplify adding support for new devices. This would also have the benefit of only including the code that’s needed by each particular sketch. Recently, there have been a few folks having trouble compiling the 3rd party DHT module. It seems that there are some differences between compiling natively and compiling in the Particle.io web IDE. An the irony is that DHT support might not even be needed for the folks having these problems. So my lazy solution is remove the DHT code and put it into a plugin.
So that’s what I’ll be working on for the next couple weeks. I’ll update this post with details as I work them out.