Modern Toil

It’s no surprise I’m a huge fan of home automation and tech toys, and I recently picked up a pair of Belkin WeMo’s.

You **have** to set them up with the app they supply for smartphones, but after that I hoped I could find a way to control them directly. Belkin has collected quite a few negative reviews for these devices, and it’s a shame, because the hardware seems real solid.  It’s their current apps that leave a LOT to be desired.  Clearly the issues they’re having getting the app side right are driving down the reviews.  Fortunately, I could care less how the app experience is, since I only needed it to initially deploy the devices, and planned from the get-go to write my own code to control them.

Numerous folks have written tools to control some of the functions of these, but everything I came across was dependent on other libraries, was incomplete, or didn’t work when I tested it.  I like plain-old vanilla shell scripts that I can just run from any local machine, and I’ve hacked up various XML snippets I’ve found and just rely on curl for the following script that I put together:

#!/bin/sh
#
# WeMo Control Script
#
# Usage: ./wemo_control IP_ADDRESS ON/OFF/GETSTATE/GETSIGNALSTRENGTH/GETFRIENDLYNAME
#
#

IP=$1
COMMAND=$2

PORTTEST=$(curl -s $IP:49152 | grep “404″)

if [ "$PORTTEST" = "" ]
then
PORT=49153
else
PORT=49152
fi

if [ "$1" = "" ]
then
echo “Usage: ./wemo_control IP_ADDRESS ON/OFF/GETSTATE/GETSIGNALSTRENGTH/GETFRIENDLYNAME”
else

if [ "$2" = "GETSTATE" ]

then

curl -0 -A ” -X POST -H ‘Accept: ‘ -H ‘Content-type: text/xml; charset=”utf-8″‘ -H “SOAPACTION: \”urn:Belkin:service:basicevent:1#GetBinaryState\”" –data ‘<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?><s:Envelope xmlns:s=”http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/” s:encodingStyle=”http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/”><s:Body><u:GetBinaryState xmlns:u=”urn:Belkin:service:basicevent:1″><BinaryState>1</BinaryState></u:GetBinaryState></s:Body></s:Envelope>’ -s http://$IP:$PORT/upnp/control/basicevent1 |
grep “<BinaryState”  | cut -d”>” -f2 | cut -d “<” -f1 | sed ’s/0/OFF/g’ | sed ’s/1/ON/g’

elif [ "$2" = "ON" ]

then

curl -0 -A ” -X POST -H ‘Accept: ‘ -H ‘Content-type: text/xml; charset=”utf-8″‘ -H “SOAPACTION: \”urn:Belkin:service:basicevent:1#SetBinaryState\”" –data ‘<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?><s:Envelope xmlns:s=”http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/” s:encodingStyle=”http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/”><s:Body><u:SetBinaryState xmlns:u=”urn:Belkin:service:basicevent:1″><BinaryState>1</BinaryState></u:SetBinaryState></s:Body></s:Envelope>’ -s http://$IP:$PORT/upnp/control/basicevent1 |
grep “<BinaryState”  | cut -d”>” -f2 | cut -d “<” -f1

elif [ "$2" = "OFF" ]

then

curl -0 -A ” -X POST -H ‘Accept: ‘ -H ‘Content-type: text/xml; charset=”utf-8″‘ -H “SOAPACTION: \”urn:Belkin:service:basicevent:1#SetBinaryState\”" –data ‘<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?><s:Envelope xmlns:s=”http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/” s:encodingStyle=”http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/”><s:Body><u:SetBinaryState xmlns:u=”urn:Belkin:service:basicevent:1″><BinaryState>0</BinaryState></u:SetBinaryState></s:Body></s:Envelope>’ -s http://$IP:$PORT/upnp/control/basicevent1 |
grep “<BinaryState”  | cut -d”>” -f2 | cut -d “<” -f1

elif [ "$2" = "GETSIGNALSTRENGTH" ]

then

curl -0 -A ” -X POST -H ‘Accept: ‘ -H ‘Content-type: text/xml; charset=”utf-8″‘ -H “SOAPACTION: \”urn:Belkin:service:basicevent:1#GetSignalStrength\”" –data ‘<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?><s:Envelope xmlns:s=”http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/” s:encodingStyle=”http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/”><s:Body><u:GetSignalStrength xmlns:u=”urn:Belkin:service:basicevent:1″><GetSignalStrength>0</GetSignalStrength></u:GetSignalStrength></s:Body></s:Envelope>’ -s http://$IP:$PORT/upnp/control/basicevent1 |
grep “<SignalStrength”  | cut -d”>” -f2 | cut -d “<” -f1

elif [ "$2" = "GETFRIENDLYNAME" ]

then

curl -0 -A ” -X POST -H ‘Accept: ‘ -H ‘Content-type: text/xml; charset=”utf-8″‘ -H “SOAPACTION: \”urn:Belkin:service:basicevent:1#ChangeFriendlyName\”" –data ‘<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?><s:Envelope xmlns:s=”http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/” s:encodingStyle=”http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/”><s:Body><u:ChangeFriendlyName xmlns:u=”urn:Belkin:service:basicevent:1″><FriendlyName>Pool Filter</FriendlyName></u:ChangeFriendlyName></s:Body></s:Envelope>’ -s http://$IP:$PORT/upnp/control/basicevent1 |
grep “<FriendlyName”  | cut -d”>” -f2 | cut -d “<” -f1

else

echo “COMMAND NOT RECOGNIZED”
echo “”
echo “Usage: ./wemo_control IP_ADDRESS ON/OFF/GETSTATE/GETSIGNALSTRENGTH/GETFRIENDLYNAME”
echo “”

fi

fi

Copy/Paste or download here: wemo_control.sh

Usage is:   ./wemo_control IP_ADDRESS ON/OFF/GETSTATE/GETSIGNALSTRENGTH/GETFRIENDLYNAME and the functions are pretty self-explanatory.

The usual disclaimer applies.  I don’t write code for a living and there’s probably gross inefficiencies and poor syntax, but it WORKS.

Enjoy