Rob Connolly's Blog

So having (re-)discovered that writing blog posts takes an inordinate amount of time, I’ve not been updating this blog as I was attempting to. I found that in order to get out two or three longish technical posts per week would eat up most of my free time. As such I’ve decided to focus on completing projects and will attempt to write them up as part of the completion process.

Another non-new years resolution I’ve made is to just release more of the stuff I do to the world. This is more than just an effort at dumping stuff over the fence. I want to document things so that they are useful to others. Hopefully, this will mean more projects will show up on my Gitlab account. It will also include publishing any contributions I make to other projects.

As part of this I’m undertaking to write a monthly update here, detailing what I’ve managed to accomplish during the month. I’m aiming to publish these in the last few days of each month and this is the first. So without further ado…

The two projects I’ve mainly focused on this month have been:

1. Contributing back the Kankun SP3 wifi switch component I made for Home Assistant. I’ve been running this component for ages on my own instance, but have never contributed it back. This took me quite some time, since the Home Assistant developers have a heavy focus on code quality and documentation (a good thing). All in all the experience I’ve had contributing that one small component was a good one and I’ll definitely be contributing more when I have time. I’m happy to say my changes were accepted and are in the 0.36 release. You can find the documentation for the Kankun SP3 component here.
2. Another Home Assistant related project is the Home Assistant Mycroft Skill I’ve been working on. I’ve now released this as version 1.0.0 (in so far as pushing a git tag constitutes a release). The skill is now capable of turning on and off various entities within HASS and works quite well. I decided to implement fuzzy string matching for entity friendly names since when I was testing turning on and off my kettle, Mycroft would always think I said ‘cattle’. Using the python fuzzywuzzy module this was easy. Basically I look through all the available entities and select the one with the largest score as returned by fuzzywuzzy (which is based on Levenshtein Distance). I’m pretty happy with the result, which you can find here.

That’s all for now, see you next month (or before if I feel like writing in the meantime).