External converters

Hi, @Koenkk

I’ve noticed a little pain in diy community. Each and every DIY developer needs to write/modify converters, some times this devices are in very limited quantity or not even meant to be published. So many guys are modifying fromZigbee.js straight from node_modules folder, which eventually causes all changes are lost during update. What if we implement mechanism to support external converters? We can create base package with some interfaces, like this

interface FromZigbeeConverter {
    cluster: string;
    type: string[];
    convert(model, msg, publish, options, meta): unknown;
}

interface ToZigbeeConverter {
    key: string[];
    convertSet(entity, key, value, meta): Promise<void>;
    convertGet(entity, key, meta): Promise<unknown>;
}
interface DeviceDescriptor {
    zigbeeModel: string[];
    model: string;
    vendor: string;
    description: string;
    supports: string;
    fromZigbee: FromZigbeeConverter[];
    toZigbee: ToZigbeeConverter[];
    meta?: { configureKey: number },
    configure?(device, coordinatorEndpoint): Promise<void>
}

• package.json declaration

{
 "name": "my-awesome-converter"
  "main": "custom-converter.js"
}

users could install their packages like this, or even from their github repositories npm install ~/my-super-converter

And implement loading js modules who are implementing this interfaces. This configuration can be placed in z2m configuration files, where we can just list of packages ex:

external_converters:
    - my-awesome-converter

If this idea is good enough, I’m ready to invest my time into implementation.

[nurikk]

Hi, @ciotlosm! Can you try to prepend NODE_PATH=/app/node_modules env variable before ZIGBEE2MQTT_DATA in Dockerfile?

[Koenkk]

Done, documentation: https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt.io/blob/develop/docs/externalConvertersExample/dummy-converter.js#L66