Is anyone on HN actively using this? I’ve had a hard time understanding what exactly I would use it for or what purpose it would serve beyond what integrations Home Assistant (for example) already provides.
I was using it but it was very unreliable in my experience. The PWA app you can install on your phone would work for a few days and just appear to stop working until you reinstalled it. Then with Mozilla firing devs including the devs who work on their core product (Firefox/Browser Engine) and then spinning WebThings out into it's own thing, I have decided to stop using it because I don't believe it has much of a future because the management appears to have gone off the rails.
I will reevaluate it in a year, if it still exists, because it's actually a pretty nice platform to use.
Organizationally they were part of the Emerging Technologies Group, not the Firefox Group.
And contrary to popular belief, there were no plans to replace Gecko with Servo wholesale, so I don’t really think it is accurate to think of it as “core” to Firefox.
To me, it mainly comes down to the extensibility model.
In Home Assistant, the primary way to do anything is to use Integrations that plug into your monolithic Home Assistant application.
In WebThings, there is a robust model for putting your devices online that other services & applications can script. It's also built around very nice sets of standards[1], which means you don't need to use the WebThings Gateway or the WebThings Thing UI. For example there's a web based 3D ui using AFrame[2]. to demo it's use, there is a fake/demo standalone webserver pretending to be a solar roof[3]. Not high production, but being able to hack out a WebThings standard ui or device at a lightning pace is extremely impressive.
A lot of folk are well served by the monolith, but long term, having everything bound up in a single technology stack, having to live with every choice Home Assistant has made, is extremely unappealing to me personally.
I've started moving my ZWave stuff over to WebThings. I'd like to add my LiFX equipment too. Previously I had just been using some Node.js scripts I'd authored myself to control these devices & to record energy consumption. It was a fun project, and I had been doing some kind of similar but not as good decoupling work like WebThings does, but I'm looking forward to having an API-first means of doing this work, and especially excited to see semantic web / jsonld baked in from the start.
It's a much less mature equivalent to HA but with a drastically better UX/UI. I have tried to use HA several times over the past 4 years and imo it is an awful user experience with a big learning curve.
Webthings is beautifully simple and just works but it's also immature and constrainted compared to HA.
For my needs, controlling some Bali Z-Wave blinds, it works perfectly though.
I tried it when I first heard of it about a year ago.
It's a user-friendly IOT ecosystem. It uses a pi so you can use ZigBee etc adapters.
They also have their own open protocol. It is WiFi based, I wrote/made a simple webthing, I quite liked the experience.
At that time, it was not reliable enough. I evaluated it for a business critical timer (turn on 8am, turn off 5pm), really simple. Unfortunately, it frequently failed to turn on/off at the scheduled time. Cron and curl would have been more reliable.
I imagine it has improved by now. I should give it another whirl.
I've been using it reliably for about 4 months now to control some blinds. At first I had issues but it boiled down to reception issues. After reorienting the antennas on the blinds and moving the Gateway outside of a SME, everything works fine.
It's not as customizable under the hood as Home Assistant, but it's much easier to setup than HA.
Mozilla was attempting to market it to telcos and home router manufacturers as a IoT addon for a while (in competition with stacks such as Samsung's SmartThings) so they did do quite a bit of working making it usable for the average person.
Disclosure: I worked at Mozilla with the core WebThings dev team and still collaborate with devs on this project. I don't do devel on the gateway, but I create "web things" (IoT devices) that connect to it.
I use the gateway to manage my smart home and I love it. Love the privacy. Love the rules. Love the add-ons.
Going forward, I'd like to see companies adopt it yes, but my main focus will be pushing the gateway and framework to be used for STEM education around IoT. I currently work with the https://MicroBlocks.fun team, an awesome FOSS STEM edu tool for programming microcontrollers. I drove a Mozilla Open Source Software (MOSS) support grant to fund the core MicroBlocks devs to build a "web thing" library, when at Mozilla. The combo of the two projects is awesome imho.
If you can't buy an IoT device to suit your needs, you can easily build one. :)
WebThings works with Zigbee and Z-Wave devices out if the box. It has support for Eufy, Etekcity, LIFX, Philips Hue, Ring, Roku, LG WebOS, Sonos, Kasa, and tons more.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 52.2 ms ] threadI will reevaluate it in a year, if it still exists, because it's actually a pretty nice platform to use.
Ummm, no, in general those were the devs who weren’t laid off. (I am a Mozilla employee)
And contrary to popular belief, there were no plans to replace Gecko with Servo wholesale, so I don’t really think it is accurate to think of it as “core” to Firefox.
In Home Assistant, the primary way to do anything is to use Integrations that plug into your monolithic Home Assistant application.
In WebThings, there is a robust model for putting your devices online that other services & applications can script. It's also built around very nice sets of standards[1], which means you don't need to use the WebThings Gateway or the WebThings Thing UI. For example there's a web based 3D ui using AFrame[2]. to demo it's use, there is a fake/demo standalone webserver pretending to be a solar roof[3]. Not high production, but being able to hack out a WebThings standard ui or device at a lightning pace is extremely impressive.
A lot of folk are well served by the monolith, but long term, having everything bound up in a single technology stack, having to live with every choice Home Assistant has made, is extremely unappealing to me personally.
I've started moving my ZWave stuff over to WebThings. I'd like to add my LiFX equipment too. Previously I had just been using some Node.js scripts I'd authored myself to control these devices & to record energy consumption. It was a fun project, and I had been doing some kind of similar but not as good decoupling work like WebThings does, but I'm looking forward to having an API-first means of doing this work, and especially excited to see semantic web / jsonld baked in from the start.
[1] https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/
[2] https://github.com/rzr/aframe-webthing
[2] https://github.com/rzr/aframe-smart-home
you'll find more demos and details at
https://purl.org/rzr/presentations
Webthings is beautifully simple and just works but it's also immature and constrainted compared to HA.
For my needs, controlling some Bali Z-Wave blinds, it works perfectly though.
It's a user-friendly IOT ecosystem. It uses a pi so you can use ZigBee etc adapters.
They also have their own open protocol. It is WiFi based, I wrote/made a simple webthing, I quite liked the experience.
At that time, it was not reliable enough. I evaluated it for a business critical timer (turn on 8am, turn off 5pm), really simple. Unfortunately, it frequently failed to turn on/off at the scheduled time. Cron and curl would have been more reliable.
I imagine it has improved by now. I should give it another whirl.
Mozilla was attempting to market it to telcos and home router manufacturers as a IoT addon for a while (in competition with stacks such as Samsung's SmartThings) so they did do quite a bit of working making it usable for the average person.
I use the gateway to manage my smart home and I love it. Love the privacy. Love the rules. Love the add-ons.
Going forward, I'd like to see companies adopt it yes, but my main focus will be pushing the gateway and framework to be used for STEM education around IoT. I currently work with the https://MicroBlocks.fun team, an awesome FOSS STEM edu tool for programming microcontrollers. I drove a Mozilla Open Source Software (MOSS) support grant to fund the core MicroBlocks devs to build a "web thing" library, when at Mozilla. The combo of the two projects is awesome imho.
If you can't buy an IoT device to suit your needs, you can easily build one. :)
A talk I gave in Sept shows a "walk around the house" demo at about 13:00min. It gives you a small taste of what you can do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a0gXt8m9Yw
Checked the installation and user guide but there's not even a list of devices or any link to one.
1.0 feels a little premature if there's little to no hardware.
[0]: https://github.com/WebThingsIO/wiki/wiki/Supported-Hardware