... and there was much rejoicing (yea)

Well the last few weeks have been surprisingly productive. I've spent a good portion of my work hours doing work related training (Agile, API testing etc.) and of course my testing work. The reason I mention it is that usually long hours in online learning means I'm dain bread and unable to do much thinking (like binging on Beavis and Butt-head for a week). Instead I've been preparing for my TCF presentation next month (3/19). I've managed to rustle up a cellular router so my presentation will have access to the internet (and through a VPN, my home). I just did the initial install of SmartThings starter kit (hub, outlet, motion sensor and 2 magnetic security sensors). Now I'm playing with code to allow the SmartThings hub to share it's devices with my local MQTT server. I took a look at several different versions of other people's code and settled on St John's code and Github repo. After a bit if finagling I was finally able to get it to mostly work. I can monitor the devices but I can't yet control the SmartThings outlet from MQTT. Hence today's title. I also still have a ton of presentation work to do and I need to reduce the slides down to a manageable few (I have several hundred).

The was a bit more good news, the SmartThings Shield arrived. I probably won't get to work on that for more than a month but at least I have it. Hopefully I'll be able to sit down with the SmartThings documentation and get a better understanding of how SmartThings works. At this moment I think I understand the Device Type and Smart App I installed but I wouldn't bet on it. I really need to sit down and study the documentation. At least I got my hands dirty with the code. :-)