How to monitor PC from sharptools

[josh]

@Dominick_S_Barile

any suggestions or should i just move on?

Glad to hear that you are enjoying working with AI tools and building some neat integrations!

I’m a huge fan of AI tooling and how it can enable the development of cool new things. More specifically, I’m a huge proponent of human in the loop AI usage.

Please keep in mind that I’m a real life human on the other side of the wire here, so unlike an AI I’m not able to respond immediately - especially on a holiday weekend. And it’s 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!

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@Dominick_S_Barile

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?

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 ‘Mixed Content’ blocking.

The self signed approach could work in theory but it’s finicky to get right and doesn’t scale well across multiple devices.

You can find more about Mixed Content blocking in the following thread as it’s a common question that also impacts accessing local HTTP cameras.

Google Chrome - Mixed Content - Media Not Showing

Google Chrome has begun rolling out an update that will block “Mixed Content” starting with Chrome 85. ‘Mixed Content’ is when non-SSL content is displayed on an SSL page (eg. displaying an insecure http:// image on an secure https:// site). As of Chromium 111, a bug was introduced which breaks the ‘Allow Insecure’ option which is used for allowing mixed content. Keep in mind that this is the browser engine behind many modern web browsers like Chrome, Edge, Opera, the Android System Webview, a…

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@Dominick_S_Barile

Is there a preferred or supported way to have a custom tile communicate with a local Windows service?
If there is a recommended approach, I’m happy to change the implementation.

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.

SharpTools Bridge private alpha is starting

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.