Morten Nielsen shares his journey and work on getting ZWave devices working in .NET and UWP Apps…
In my recent IoTivity hacking, I wanted to create a bridge between ZWave and IoTivity, and run it as a StartUp task on my Raspberry.
Something similar already exists in Windows IoT Core, as a bridge between ZWave and AllJoyn. Actually all you have to do is get a Generation 2 Aeotec ZWave ZStick, plug it into your device running IoT COre and you got yourself a ZWave-to-AllJoyn bridge. Unfortunately those aren’t being sold any longer, only the Generation 5, which isn’t compatible with the bridge. AllJoyn isn’t doing too well either.
Anyway, back to IoTivity: To build a bridge, I needed a ZWave library that supports UWP. After all, most of my devices are ZWave devices. I have my SmartThings hub as a primary controller, but you can add any number of ZWave USB Sticks as secondary controllers to the ZWave network. So I can continue to rely on SmartThings (for now), while I start hacking with the USB controller against the same devices.
Luckily Donald Hanson has an awesome pull-request for OpenZWave that adds a native UWP wrapper around OpenZWave, based on the .NET CLI wrapper…
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Anyway go grab the source-code (make sure you get the submodule too), and try it out: https://github.com/dotMorten/openzwave-dotnet-uwp
Here’s how you start it up:
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The rest is in the Notification handler. Every time a node is found, changed, remove etc. an event is reported here, including responses to commands you send. Nodes are identified by the HomeID (one per usb controller), and by the NodeID. You use these two values to uniquely identify a node on your network, and can then oerform operations like changing properties via the ZWManager instance.
There’s a generic sample app you can use to find, interrogate and interact with the devices, or just learn from. Longer-term I’d like to build a simpler API on top of this to work with the devices. The Main ViewModel in the sample-app is in a way the beginnings of this.
And by all means, submit some pull requests!”
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