Far too easy to accidentally power of devices with Mozilla IOT

WebThings
#1

My impression is that the Gateway should UI makes too easy to accitentaly power of devices. For example in the first 5 minutes after I installed Mozilla IoT Gateway at home I managed to power-off my entire garage-lab.

After I added the power-meter which tracks how much power my garage-rack is taking I click it, excpeting to see more information about the device. By now you probably already know what happened, the entire network went down and I had to go outside and restart it manually.

Just clicking on such devices shoul not trigger on/off, some of them are not light switches. We need at least some kind of protection for accidental use.

#2

You can set the plugs to be presented as Energy Monitors rather than plugs or on/off switches. Go into the device’s properties, click on the overflow menu button in the lower-right corner of the screen and select edit. Below the device name, there is a drop-down menu.

You can still turn the plug off from the properties screen, but at least it’s less likely to happen by accident.

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#3

Thank you for your feedback that the user interface is too easy to use :wink:

The default action of clicking on a thing icon is determined by the web thing type you select when you add it. You can change this type afterwards by clicking on the “…” icon on the thing detail view and clicking on “Edit”.

I was going to suggest something similar to @jharris and say that if you change the web thing type of your smart plug to a “Custom Thing” then turning it on and off will require two clicks and will be harder to do by accident. Their suggestion is even better though because if your device exposes the Energy Monitor capability then setting that as the web thing type will mean the icon communicates some useful information without being able to accidentally turn it off.

Hope this helps.

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