This is part of a bigger project where I am trying to build a smart home from scratch. My main server is a Raspberry Pi 4 which communicates with some NodeMcu ESP-8266 boards that I have placed around my house. One of these boards is placed close to my TV and so I thought I could connect that to a relay and manage the power of my TV through the main server. Then I thought, I could make a gnome extension for that just so I can practice.
My code is based on these two tutorials:
- julio641742/gnome-shell-extension-reference.
- Susanna Huhtanen/JavaScript and GNOME 3 (+the comments).
I have made some small tweaks so that the top-bar icon has two states, one when the tv is open and one where the tv power is off. In addition, when a button is pressed, a text will appear in the middle of the screen showing the current TV status. The button on the top bar shows the current status and when pressed that status will change.
The flow is like this:
- If the current button is play, then when pressed, the TV will be turned off by sending a
GETrequest to the corresponding endpoint for turning off the tv. Also, the button will change to the shutdown button (since the TV is currently shut). - If the current button is the shutdown one, then when pressed, the TV will be turned on by sending a
GETrequest to the corresponding endpoint for turning on the tv. Also, the button will change to the play button (since the TV has been turned on).
The button icons look like this:
When the shut button is pressed, then the TV will be turned on and a status text will appear in the middle of the screen, like this:
You may clone this repository and change the extension.js file. At first you may change the BASE_URL variable which is set to my server's IP. You should also change the endpoints that are decided in the _changeStatus function.
The installation and usage is then just like any other extension. You can get rid of the unwanted files (.git, images/ directories and the README.md file) and then copy the rest to ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/tv-switch-gnome-shell-extension (or wherever your gnome extensions are saved). You need to make sure that the name of the directory is the above (it must be the project's uuid which is defined in metadata.json).
The extension is now working with gnome 3.38. The only changes where that Tweener is now imported as const Tweener = imports.tweener.tweener; (instead of from imports.ui.tweener in gnome 3.36) and that St.Bin is now initialized with the x_expand and y_expand arguments.
- Connect the temperature sensor to the extension. A new label should appear in the top bar that updates the home temperature every 5-15 minutes.