See the status of your connected devices with the Text Feed Widget
Having a hard time knowing what is happening to your connected devices? Then log every activity in real-time! With the Text Feed Widget, you will be able to know what is going on with your connected devices!
HOLD YOUR HORSES! To get started with your first awesome project with this widget, start off by reading the Introduction. You’ll understand what Meeo is all about. If you already read it, then let us proceed 🤘.
If you have chosen to add this awesome widget from the Widget Menu, you can give a specific name to your widget by typing on the “Name” field. You do not need to type anything on the “Channel” field for now because anything you type on the “Name” field is reflected on the “Channel” field (everything is in small caps and each word is separated with a dash sign “-”). If you really want to have a specific channel for your widget, then you can type the channel name you want. In case you are wondering what is the difference between the “Name” and “Channel” field, the first field lets you give a cool name to your widget. The second field is used as a channel for your devices to subscribe to or to publish data on. If you are happy with the name of your widget, you can now click/press the “Save” button.
Text Feed Widget Information
In order for your device to connect to your widget, you need to know the widget’s information. To access this, each widget has an “Option” icon on the top right corner. Click/press the icon and you will see the Widget Information Box as shown on the image below:
The Widget Information Box holds the most important information of a widget; the topic. If you would notice, the topic is separated by a “/”. The phrase on the left is called the namespace while the phrase on the right is called the channel (remember the “Channel” field?). You should take note of these because it is needed by the Meeo Arduino Library.
Text Feed Widget Data
Your connected devices usually do a lot of things like connect to a server, send a request and what not. Logging each activity enables you to know what is going on. The Text Feed Widget is the perfect component for logging purposes. Logs usually have severity and it comes in four states: “info” for information, “warning” for warning, “error” for error and “fatal” for fatal. The severity states give out different visual cues to the widget. Each severity state has its own usage:
- no severity state — if ever you do not put any severity state, you will just see the message without any visual cues.
info—your connected device has done its activity successfully. The visual cue to take note of is the text color becomes blue.warning— your connected device has encountered an unexpected behavior but it is still successful in doing its activity. The visual cue to take note of is the text color becomes orange.error— your connected device has encountered an error when doing its activity. It’s not yet life threatening but you need to fix the error. 😂 The visual cue to take note of is the text color becomes red.fatal— your connected device has exploded! 😱 KIDDING! 😂 your connected device encountered something bad. You need to fix it ASAP. The visual cue to take note of is the text color becomes white and the text is highlighted with red.
The following data can be published or sent by your connected device to the widget and the visual:
Normal message
[info] Successfully done!
[warning] Packet dropped but recovered
[error] Packet dropped
[fatal] App crashed!
See what your connected devices are doing right now!
Now that you know the intricacies of the Text Feed Widget, you will be able to see whether your connected devices are working properly or not! You will be confident that whatever happens to your connected devices, you will be able to see it in real-time 😎🤘
