Ok, well, baby steps or not – there’s just no way to avoid it… I need to start coding!

I’ve set up a new project on GitHub, called HouseMon – to have a place to put everything. It does almost nothing, other than what you’ll recognise after yesterday’s weblog post:

This was started with the idea of creating the whole setup as installable “Briqs” modules, which can then be configured for use. And indeed, some of that will be unavoidable right from the start – after all, to connect this to a JeeNode or JeeLink, I’m going to have to specify the serial port (even if the serial ports are automatically enumerated one day, the proper one will need to be selected in case there is more than one).

However, this immediately adds an immense amount of complexity over just hard-coding all the choices in the app for just my specific installation. Now, in itself, I’m not too worried by that – but with so little experience with Node.js and the rest, I just can’t make this kind of decisions yet. There’s too big a gap between what I know and understand today, and what I need to know to come up with a good modular system. The whole thing could be built completely out of npm packages, or perhaps even the lighter-weight Components mechanism. Too early to tell, and definitely too early to make such key decisions!

Just wanted to get this repository going to be able to actually build stuff. And for others to see what’s going on as this evolves over time. It’s real code, so you can play with it if you like. And of course make suggestions and point out things on the issue tracker. I’ll no doubt keep posting about this stuff here whenever the excitement gets too high, but this sort of concludes nearly two weeks of continuous immersion and blogging about this topic.

It’s time for me to get back to some other work. Never a dull moment here at JeeLabs! :)