The operating system these devices run is called MiOS which is essentially Linux/ARM and lots of glue. Mi Casa Verde operates a free VPN service that allows you to operate them remotely, and there are a number of free/paid smartphone apps available (though none struck me as particularly special). All of the interactions with MiOS work on a job queue basis. When a job is submitted, it’s status must be polled for success/failure. The Ruby library embraces this and allows jobs to be run synchronously or asynchronously.

Some snippets from the github page:

mios = MiOS::Interface.new('http://192.168.15.1:3480')
switch = mios.devices[0]
switch.off! { |obj|
  puts "The #{obj.name} is now off"
}
puts "This will get printed once the switch is off and the block has been executed"

switch.on!(true) { |obj|
  puts "The #{obj.name} is now on"
}
puts "This will output immediately"
sleep(5) # Sleep to wait for the thread to finish

Every device is supported by manually issuing commands as listed in the wiki and the devices that I currently use have nice wrappers around those for idiomatic usage (example).

Installation instructions and additional usage examples can be found on github under the ruby-mios project.

Enjoy!

In a stripped down example, an HTTParty class looks somewhat like this:

class Foo
  include HTTParty
  base_uri 'http://example.com'

  def bar
    self.class.get '/some/resource'
  end
end

But rewriting it like so allows the same class usage but with variable base_uris:

class Foo
  class << self
    def new(uri, *args)
      Class.new(AbstractFoo) { |klass|
        klass.base_uri(uri)
      }.new(*args)
    end
  end

  class AbstractFoo
    include HTTParty

    def bar
      self.class.get '/some/resource'
    end
  end
end

foo1 = Foo.new('http://example.com')
foo2 = Foo.new('http://otherexample.com')

Thread-safe and no passing around stuff .. my little amusement for the day.

The largest improvement is the ability to cast single columns at a time. One of the major pain points previously was that if a column in Cassandra had existing data and it’s validation changed to make that data invalid (empty string in an Integer-validated column for instance), none of the data in that row would be accessible as the entire row was casted at once. Each column is now individually casted and cached and if there is invalid data in a validated column, it will raise a CastException that contains a useful description of the problem as well as the bytes that raised the exception.

Another important bug fix is for character encoding in Ruby 1.9. The previous version incorrectly used ASCII-8BIT on data retrieved from ASCII-validated columns which when stored back into Cassandra, would encode it as binary. A simple change to US-ASCII in the casting has fixed that.

gem install cassandra-cql

Enjoy!

We worked with the great team over at Phidgets to add Ruby to their supported languages.  You can check out the Getting Started with Phidgets in Ruby guide, or check out phidgets-ffi on github.