Adding Internet data to your home automation dashboard
Using Lynx with Node-RED
Like Home Assistant, Node-RED requires you to load the Lynx utility on the Node-RED system. For a Raspian/Debian/Ubuntu system, you can install Lynx with:
sudo apt install lynx
To test that Lynx is working within Node-RED, you can use an inject
, an exec
, and a debug
node (Figure 6). For my test, I used the Bash statement to find pollen levels as the command in the exec
flow. It's important to note that the top output connector of exec
flow is the output result (stdout).
The next step is to create some logic that schedules the scraping of web pages and then shows the data on a web dashboard. Figure 7 shows a Node-RED example that uses a Big Timer
to trigger the scraping of web pages. For the presentation of data, a Text
dashboard flow is used to show the pollen levels, and a Gauge
dashboard flow is used for the snow levels. The realtime data is available at: http://my_node_red_ip_address:1880/ui (Figure 8).
Using Node-RED within Home Assistant
If you are running Node-RED within Home Assistant you will need to install Lynx within the Node-RED working environment.
Like with the command-line sensor install example, the Bash apk add
command can be run in a Node-RED exec
node. Figure 9 is an example that uses an inject
node to manually initiate the installation. A debug
node verifies that the command ran cleanly.
Summary
To create a successful home automation solution, it is important to access and view all the relevant signals on a regular basis. From my personal experience, I found that, when I first set up the classic IoT environment for measuring and controlling devices, I would only infrequently look at the system. However, since I started adding hobby topics to the dashboard, I've noticed that I use the system a lot more often.
Infos
- Home Assistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/
- Node-RED: https://nodered.org/
- Beautiful Soup documentation: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/
- Home Assistant Scrape sensor documentation: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/scrape/
- Node-RED scrape-it documentation: https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-scrape-it
- Lynx text-based browser: https://lynx.invisible-island.net//
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