ESP code to read the approx device location

rin67630 · July 7, 2024, 8:05am

Hi,
Thinger knows the approximate location of my device, since it displays it on a map.
Is there a hidden device property to get this latitude and longitude from Thinger?
I would like to get the weather from openweathermap.org without requiring the user to enter these parameters.
Regards
Laszlo

P.S. I am trying to reduce the amount of configuration required for Thinger devices to a minimum.
So if, once connected to Thinger.io, it could be possible to get the time zone data for that device too, or even get the local time from a property without need to write code for NTP server, that would really be great.
It does not need to be very accurate.

alvarolb · July 10, 2024, 3:09pm

Hi @rin67630,

this is an interesting feature. Thanks for sharing

I think the easiest way would be to automatically create/update the location on each device connection (if not already defined by the user).

I reference your issue here for further discussion:

github.com/thinger-io/thinger-server

Get some known Thinger's system information on an automatic device's property.

opened 02:13PM - 08 Jul 24 UTC

rin67630

I would like to make ESP32/ESP8266 easier to use with Thinger.io. Currently my …users must configure the device's location (latitude/longitude) to pass this to Openweathermap.org in order to get the current weather Thinger has already this approximate location information for each device on it's website. Couldn't we get a way to read that information from an automatic system device property? Of course, the other device's statistics, which Thinger may have, would surely be appreciated in such an automatic property. Also if we had the possibility to read the local time during setup() right from Thinger instead of having to write code to get it from NTP with the corresponding need to enter the time zone parameters would surely be a great advantage in order to simplify the device's code. That would give Thinger.io another advantage over plain MQTT solutions from the competition. ;-)