Im not a coder what so ever but I have been using AI to make a whole home dashboard with sharptools. Included in that was monitoring mt home server and emby. It seems.like its impossible to do? Im not sure if its a type vs https issue or just a plain security issue so im wondering what other people have done? @josh i could really use the help with this.At least a basic understanding and then I could even feed it to the AI. You helped me with the pop up issue and i was able to solve that problem. Well, actually, the AI did but it made my devices much more beautiful on a tablet. This is the last thing I seem to be stuck at so any help, I would appreciate it.
Can you clarify what youāve tried and whatās not working?
Iām trying to create a custom SharpTools tile that monitors my Windows home server. My goal is to display things like CPU usage, RAM usage, disk space, server online/offline status, and Emby server status.
Hereās what weāve done so far:
Created a custom ASP.NET Core Windows monitoring service.
The service exposes JSON endpoints for the server status.
Initially it was HTTP only, then we modified it to run over HTTPS.
Generated a self-signed certificate (.pfx) and configured Kestrel to use it.
Installed and trusted the certificate on my Windows PC.
Tried installing the certificate on my Android tablet as well.
Verified and updated the SharpTools custom tile code several times.
Corrected merge conflicts and confirmed the latest code is being used.
Updated all of the URLs in the tile configuration.
Tested multiple endpoints and different ports.
The SharpTools dashboard loads correctly, but the custom tile always reports āNo Data.ā
At one point we suspected SharpTools might be blocking requests because of mixed HTTP/HTTPS content, so weāre considering using a reverse proxy or Tailscale Serve, but we wanted to ask before going down that path.
My question is:
Does SharpTools have any restrictions or security policies that prevent custom tiles from making HTTPS requests to a local server with a self-signed certificate? Is there a preferred or supported way to have a custom tile communicate with a local Windows service?
If there is a recommended approach, Iām happy to change the implementation.
Thank you Josh. BTW I am loving sharp tools but it has taken 2 weeks of my life away so this is the last thing i need to finishā¦.well this and im getting rid of my ring cameras. Thank you again.
Dom
@josh any suggestions or should i just move on?
Glad to hear that you are enjoying working with AI tools and building some neat integrations!
Iām a huge fan of AI tooling and how it can enable the development of cool new things. More specifically, Iām a huge proponent of human in the loop AI usage.
Please keep in mind that Iām a real life human on the other side of the wire here, so unlike an AI Iām not able to respond immediately - especially on a holiday weekend. And itās reasonable to include AI summaries and snippets in responses too - I just ask that we continue keep the human factor in mind when communicating too!
No, but your browser most likely does. Modern versions of Chrome on PC/Mac have started making allowances for communication to local devices on localhost and on local IP ranges and Chrome will prompt you for that network communication.
But most other browsers and browsers on most mobile devices block this kind of communication with HTTP resources from an HTTPS source through āMixed Contentā blocking.
The self signed approach could work in theory but itās finicky to get right and doesnāt scale well across multiple devices.
You can find more about Mixed Content blocking in the following thread as itās a common question that also impacts accessing local HTTP cameras.
You could try the mixed content workarounds. Alternatively you could report the events from your ASP.net service over webhooks.
One approach would be to update your service so it can send Webhook events and use an HTTP Trigger in SharpTools Rules and store the results in Variables. Depending on the number of attributes you are trying to map, this could get cumbersome with a large volume of attributes.
I also recently announced the SharpTools Bridge (in private alpha) which can run on a machine on your network which has an HTTP Webhook driver. It can also run custom Groovy drivers if you need custom logic / integrations.
And I saw that someone in the SmartThings community responded to you with a concept of building a custom SmartThings Edge Driver which could be an approach for this as well.
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@josh i apologize.If you thought I was rushing you, when I said moving on, I didnāt mean to rush you.I was just talking about maybe shop tools wasnāt designed for something so specific poking inside the p c. I had to use the AI to explain some of the stuff because I donāt know exactly how to explain it.Iām not a coder, but iām not kidding.You, iāve been enjoying everything.Designing this tablet and iām gonna post some pics once itās done. Iām hoping to be done after this.Because this thing has taken lots of time away.Almost all my free time, which is not a lot period especially in these child and work, so Iāll be going to bed much later, which is not good lol. Again, thank you for all the great work youāve done designing shop tools.
Dom
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Hi!
Iām not sure if youād be able to monitor this directly through Sharptools, because it involves several information-retrieval routines.
Note that I set up something similar to what youāre trying to do.
In the case of Hubitat, the hub itself has a tool called Hub Information that provides over 100 pieces of information about the platform; I used the most relevant ones.
For my three VMs, I installed a Python server on Windows and, using ClaudeAI, set up several hooks that are queried to generate the information. In my case, I use MSR Reactor (Reactor - Multi-Hub Automation) to handle all my automations; it calls the hooks and then feeds variables into Sharptools to display the information.
I used this same method in two other tiles I posted here, and I think itās a method you could use as a reference.
All of these tiles are fed by external data stored in Sharoptools variables.
I hope this was helpful.