I am at the very beginning of exploring controlling devices via RS-232 and wondering if there is any hope of leveraging SharpTools. Any insight or breadcrumbs you might have leading to a possible solution would be appreciated.
There’s probably a number of different ways to approach this, but the RS-232 device would need some way to interface with your smart home hub or the network directly. I would preface this that unless someone else already wrote an integration for it, you’re likely going to have to do the heavy lifting on the smart home ‘driver’ / integration side of things.
At one point, I built a RS232 device to directly interface with the ‘Ex-link’ port on my older Samsung TV. I wrote a little Python script that was able to send the commands over RS232 and built a tiny webserver into it so I could use that to interface with my smart home hub.
There are off-the-shelf RS232 to Ethernet devices and you might even be able to use one of those directly. The challenge is that your particular use-case for the device might not be directly covered by an existing device driver for one of the many smart home hubs we support, so you might have to write your own driver (or modify someone else’s existing driver).
Depending on the type of RS232 to Ethernet adapter (or broader approach you take), you might even be able to communicate directly with SharpTools (eg. Rules with HTTP Triggers). Some of that would depend on what you already have in your smart home setup and what your broader vision is for things.