Next Generation of this application

[IamTheCarl]

I've been finding myself wishing there were certain tools for Home Assistant, but they don't exist.
Last time I had that feeling I created this project to fill that void.

I think that the new tools I want for HA overlap with the purpose of this application, so I may add those features into this application, but the changes would be rather radical, and be breaking changes. I want a way to create automatons involving my desktop computer, but be more secure than having my HA server ssh into the machine, but less complicated than spinning up a new application with an mqtt interface.

The I want to copy the idea of ESPHome: a platform for making your own HA devices without needing to know how to write embedded C++. You just write a bunch of YAML config files.

This tool would be very similar, but would focus on the SoCs (like the Raspberry Pi) and desktops. Many features would be built in, such as the ones system-mqtt already provides. It would also be able to advertise services to HA, like to reboot the system, power it off entirely, or run a shell script. It can also advertise sensors. It could be extended by calling into other applications and parsing stdout for data. While ESPHome uses YAML, I think Lua would be a better fit for system-mqtt, as it already has the ability to read files from under /proc and would be easier to create parsers with.

A dedicated plugin for HA could make setup much easier and secure. It's important the service not advertise itself to any HA instance on any network. The same concerns apply to MQTT.

[IamTheCarl]

Thinking about it, I have concluded that it would be significantly easier to just run external programs like shell scripts, python scripts, or something you compiled and then letting parse some kind of JSON output from that.

That removes the need to compile in Lua and doesn't constrain the user to any specific language.