Why is there no programming environment/language for IoT projects?

This a suggestion for Wyze so I thought @UserCustomerGwen might be interested. (help me if I got this wrong)
I have programmed for many years and seen many different software environments come and go. One thing they all had was a language. For me it included Fortran, various assembly languages, Basic, Pascal C, C++, Ada, … . These languages all had some way to track what was happening for debugging, even if it was just printf() statements at strategic lines in the code. All the later languages came with IDE’s and full debugging. I see nothing like even a programming language for IoT developers. Both Wyze and IFTTT offer me a single programming construct- If this happens then do this. Wyze does offer me a time delay. In neither environment can I receive a trigger and then perform some simple logic and trigger an action based on that logic.

I have been doing some IoT for quite awhile, most recently using ESP2866 and ESP32’s. I have a Wyze camera, some Wyze bulbs and the Sense kit. I set up a Rule to use the Motion Sensor to detect a person leaving a room and turning off the light after a delay. No problem in Wyze because that exact thing is supported.

The next thing I wanted to do was use the same motion sensor to turn on the fan in the room after a delay. Can’t do this in Wyze because it’s using a non-Wyze WiFi plug, hence no support.

I then tried IFTTT for the first time and after some investigation, I find they have no way for me to get an event and then wait on a delay before the action. I eventually found a way using Webhooks to send a message to a website which waits and then sends a trigger back to IFTTT. Is that a hack or what?

Anyway, it occurred to me that the IoT industry is ripe for someone to come up with an integrated development environment, using an existing language, and blow IFTTT out of the water on IoT automation (unless IFTTT does it first). Wyze could do it but first they need to accept other vendor’s’ products as triggers and actions. Wyze already gives away the Motion Sensor events triggering other vendor products to IFTTT, so this is not a stretch.
I think a business model could be created around this if Wyze could quickly become the go-to place for this stuff, be it for people like me or as enterprise solutions. Make it free to small users and appropriately priced for bigger accounts.

I would like to be able to receive a trigger event from a sensor, combine that with some logic, maybe about the time of day or weather and then trigger an action. A debugger would be nice, but a real time log file would be enough.
Thanks, Larry

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General comment:
The IoT industry - while being the talk of the town everywhere - is truly still in its infancy. Be it when it comes to chipsets, to standards, airinterfaces (LTE-M, narroband LTE, WiFi, or some proprietary low power technology), on how to monetize it, and most importantly: PRIVACY.
Likely be a few years until winners and losers sort of “settle” and a few common platforms are the rigeur.

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There is a wishlist item for an API that developers can use:

With a proper API, it doesn’t really matter what language you use to built the integrations with on your side. You just call the API and get values and/or files returned.

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For things even simpler, I would be happy if Wyze products have a better integration and work nice with each other.

Let’s say if my Wyze sense detects a motion and records an event, it should be able to perform an action to ask the Wyze smart plug to turn on or off. Of course, it would be great if the GUI can let me customize and write a little script to do just that. But that’s just a dream that might never come true.

Can’t you do this in the Rules section of the app? Press the … menu in the top right corner of the app.

Add/Create Rules

When motion sensor detects motion, plug #4 turns on.
When motion sensor clears, plug#4 turns off.

These could be expanded though.

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Thanks. I didn’t know it can do that.

I am interested in this! I don’t know if this is a direction we would go but it’s a really cool idea. I never really thought about the lack of a programming language in this space before (my only programming language is MATLAB so far). :slight_smile:

Since you have done programming before, this shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out. Adding a delay to IFTTT events.