New Sky Q App

Apps
1

This thread is predominantly aimed at UK developers. I honestly havent a clue what im doing in that regard, but I’ve stubbornly persevered with Claude and managed to make an app for Sky Q (a UK cable tv broadcasters service and their hardware that supports it) that exposes a lot of data to the Homey Pro that can be used in automations.

I’ve basically just tried to copy the Rodger Selwyn one from Home Assistant.

Its working great for me now, and so I wanted to make it available to others to benefit from too, but I feel my lack of knowledge means that i wouldn’t be able to maintain it for anybody else. and so i thought i would offer it out to see if anybody wanted to take the reigns on it that actually knows what they are doing?

the data it exposes are:

-standby status (the box is never truly turned off, so just is it in standby or not)
-Channel name
-Channel numberNow playing (the name of the tv show)
-Media type (live/recorded/an app)
-Playback status (play/pause/fastforward/rewind
-Genre (what kind of show is it? football, a movie, kids shows etc)
-Synopsis (a brief description of the show)
-Age rating (not all shows carry it, but i figure could be useful to set an automation like "when show with age rating 18 is selected, and my wife and i aren’t at home, then change the tv channel to ceebeebies)

I’ve set it so that you can choose the polling interval, and I’ve set the playback polling interval distinct from the other data as I want to set automations on lighting that changes when paused, so all the other info call poll evert 10 seconds, whilst playback polls every 1second. I have also added to the settings that you can choose which data you want your Homey to poll for, so as an example you can unselect age rating if that isn’t something you feel will be useful to you.

I have no clue how to publish it to share with others, so even if a developer doesn’t want to take the reigns on it, then please can someone let me know how to release this for others to share.

Also if someone could kindly explain the etiquette of these things where I’m launching it with a ‘your on your own kid’ ethos as i wont be able to offer any support to other moving forwards I don’t think as I don’t have a clue how to code myself.

ps. Mods, apologies if this is in the wring forum, or if I’ve committed any faux pas here, i just wanted to offer out something Ive found useful to others.

2

You publish via the CLI with:

Homey app publish

The checks are a bit tougher than when you install or run. Once you have published it you go to Homey Developer Tools and login using the same account as you used in the CLI. Click on the app and you will see an option to submit it. I believe you can now go straight to test and share the url for others to install it as it won’t appear in the store.

At some point you can then submit it for review to go live. If it’s accepted it will then appear in the store.

3

Okay, I think I’ve done it right, so if anybody wants to try it then you can use this link (i hope…)

If anybody notices any errors or want any features added/amended then let me know and I’ll do what I can.

I have set this thread to being watched so I should (hopefully) get an email notification if you leave a comment on the thread, even if its a year after I have left this message, so don’t worry if my profile seems inactive, I should still hopefully message back (unless my junk mail filters you)

4

Perfect timing as it doesn’t look like I can get my dead SkyQ replaced so I won’t be able to support my app any more.

5

Great app :ok_hand: works perfectly.

6

Tested with Sky Q Germany, almost working :

  • i don’t like how favorites get selected (only channel number, so one need to send “select” button click)

  • some UI bugs (synopsis is not showing whole message in Homey App, and much too large font in Web App)

  • favorites not always updating, one can see them updated in web app, but not in homey app (might be general bug?)

  • hmm i think no stream channels aavailable in channel selector, only cable channels. That is probably Sky Q restriction here in germany after they switched from cable to stream (in my cable provider region - vodafone)

  • home button opens “my recordings” instead of home (EDIT: i see, you call Sky button and not Home)

  • the defualt behaviour of the App (single click on device, which is now turn on/off) is suboptimal, no idea if that could be changed to no action

Besides of taht happy how it works, thanks!

sky_q_webapp
sky_q_webapp624×1324 109 KB

sky_q_homeyapp
sky_q_homeyapp436×933 65.6 KB

7

interesting, I wasn’t aware that you guys has Sky Q also, i thought it was just a British thing!

  1. I’m not sure what you mean by the first bullet point, please could you provide a little more information? are you talking about the selection of which channels appear on the short list of favourites, or are you referring to the flow cards? if its the latter, then I’m going to make a few changes to that and follow @Adrian_Rockall 's lead and make it so that one card can cover up to 6 key presses, and then I’ll get rid of each individual key’s card.
  2. With regards to the synopsis, I’m not sure that the font size can be changed? I think that’s a constraint of how homey portrays these cards as they want uniformity across all of their apps. I included that information though simply because I could. I don’t actually have a use for it myself, and I don’t actually think it would be a useful feature in the smartphone app, but I thought that if someone is building a dashboard then it could be useful to include on there? You can turn off which fields your app displays though in the device’s advanced settings, and so if you don’t find that information useful then you can unselect it and it wont be displayed. I will see if I can change that font size but I don’t think that it will let me.
  3. Again I’m not sure what you mean by this. have you tried changing the polling interval? this determines how often your Homey queries the data with the Sky Q box, and so if there’s a high polling number, there’s a chance that it just hasn’t updated yet?
  4. By ‘stream channels’ do you mean the apps like Netflix? if so then I guess you’re right and that’s an oversight. I usually just use the native app in my TV for those as the image quality is better, but I could certainly look to add them if you find them useful? Claude seemed to be looking at both the channels and the apps region-specific though so it may only display UK apps. If it is useful though and I cant get it to display German ones, then I can ask it to write out a question prompt that you can ask it to help you to make a more German market friendly version? where it can just copy this one but then you can do a few probe scripts to find out the correct data to make it work properly in Germany?
  5. In the UK that button literally is a picture of a house, so if there are any button discrepancies in different regions then I’m not sure whether its better to make a separate German app, or whether its better to have a selector for the country you’re using. I would think the better solution would probably be a separate Sky Q Germany app as I won’t be able to obtain the data Claude needs to make changes for the German app. If so though I’ll be sure to rename my app to state that its the British version.
  6. Do you mean to have the device card not act as a power button? In which case that could be a good idea also, as I have accidentally tuned my box off many times in testing, but I’m not sure if its possible as it seems that all of the other devices from other apps on my Homey have that power on/off behaviour with a short press of the device card, and to open the device rather than change power state then you need a long press. Again this could be a Homey prerequisite as they look for uniformity across all devices.

As it happens I am going to have to make a fair few changes to the app to get homey to publish it. I got a polite reprimand for not reading their instructions on what the apps need to include, so I’m going to make those changes in the coming days and try again. Any suggestions are welcome in the meantime :slight_smile:

8

@t.i.n.m.a.n , I’ve done a bit more research, and it looks like I may be able to make this much more functional for German/Austrian Sky customers, but I would need a guinea pig to run a script for me so that I can provide Claude with the data it needs. Would you be able to help?

The same goes for anybody using Sky Q in the Italian market too.

Don’t worry if you don’t know what youre doing, its really simple. you will literally just need to copy and paste some code, and then click test, and then copy and paste the output.

also I was right about the script size for the synopsis, it cant be altered, but like I said you can just turn this off if it bugs you. I only added it as I thought it may be a nice touch for dashboards.