TLDR; Im controlling the color of my room lights based on my tests suite using a gem that I wrote while procastinating https://github.com/matiasmoya/tuyaiotlights/

Update: It seems that the API keys expire after 1 month of trial. I had to request a 6-month extension, but after that, it will be 3.5USD per million request. Well, I will be playing with my lights in my test suite until then lol. There's a way to run local requests but it requires booting up Home Assistant, which for some reason is an operative system... I have no RAM to spare in a VM for that.

Project idea

I was bored and I wanted to make my tests more "dramatic". I also just got some Chinese RGB lights and I figured that I could do some fun, productive procrastination exercise with them.

So I researched their integration capabilities and choices that I had to control them.

Honestly, I don’t remember how or where in their app (SmartLife) I found a link to the IoT platform "tuya.com", and found something that looked like an API for my device!

I used ChatGPT to go through the documentation, had to correct it a little bit myself with stuff that I found in my Tuya cloud dashboard, but all-in-all it was pretty straightforward! I had a small Ruby script that connected to my device and changed the lights to red in a few minutes.

The gem and going out-of-scope

Later that day I figured that would be cool to make it a Gem executable, then I ended up pushing it to Rubygems because why not. Then I figured that the original idea was to use it in a hook in my test suite and I was all over the place already lol.

If you want to play around with the idea and you have some of these Chinese light bulbs, the readme in my repo should be enough to get you started

Adding this to my test suite

Here is the snippet that does this in my minitest suite

credentials = Rails.application.credentials.tuya_lights
controller  = TuyaIotLights::SmartLightController.new(
  credentials[:client_id], 
  credentials[:secret], 
  credentials[:device_id]
)

$minitest_failed = false

class Minitest::Test
  def after_teardown
    if failure
      $minitest_failed = true
    end
    super
  end
end

Minitest.after_run do
  if $minitest_failed
    controller.change_color('red')
  else
    controller.switch_to_white_mode
  end
end

for rspec is a little bit of more ceremony having to register a formatter:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  credentials = Rails.application.credentials.tuya_lights
  controller = TuyaIotLights::SmartLightController.new(
    credentials[:client_id],
    credentials[:secret],
    credentials[:device_id]
  )

  failed = false

  config.reporter.register_listener(
    Class.new {
      RSpec::Core::Formatters.register self, :example_failed, :dump_summary

      define_method(:initialize) do |output|
        @failed = false
      end

      define_method(:example_failed) do |_notification|
        @failed = true
      end

      define_method(:dump_summary) do |_summary|
        if @failed
          controller.change_color("red")
        else
          controller.switch_to_white_mode
        end
      end
    }.new($stdout),
    :example_failed,
    :dump_summary
  )
end

These lights are cheap and fun to use, if you got one you can give it a try using my gem https://github.com/matiasmoya/tuyaiotlights/ (any light that supports SmartLife or Tuya will work)

I will move this feature to a cron job to check my servers status in the next fun-productive procastination session, may look into adding Phillips Hue to the mix too