Addition information scraping for devices

Add-ons Other
1

Hey guys,

in the light of the energy saving discussions at the moment I was thinking about my Tradfri bulbs and that I didn’t know about their energy efficiency class.
That made me wonder if it would be possible (and help-/useful as well :wink: ) to have an add-on that would pull product information of the devices that are used in openHAB, sort of like those IMDb scrapers, only that they would need to have a different source for each binding.
E.g. looking at my Tradfri bulb. It is identified as “TRADFRI bulb E14 WS 470lm”. An addon could now either pull information like image, energy class, specs and maybe even price/shopping link from the official site (TRÅDFRI LED bulb E14 470 lumen, wireless dimmable white spectrum/chandelier opal white - IKEA) or - in this case - from a linked page from EPREL (EPREL Public website).
Obviously this could be extended to other bindings as well, like Miio, Onkyo and what not.

What do you guys think? Is that a use case for a broader audience or am I the only one thinking it’s a nice feature?

Regards

1 Like
2

I don’t think I’d need it for myself, and I also I think this would be a lot of ongoing work as products/websites change over time. I build/maintain websites for a university, and generally avoid publishing any information that’s found on other websites, because I won’t know when it changes unless someone tells me.

In this case, you’d have to keep up with many different sources changing their websites constantly as they introduce and retire products or redesign their websites.

Don’t let me stop you if you think there’s a way to do it efficiently. I just wouldn’t want you to feel like you have to work on it constantly to keep it up to date. In my experience, those are the projects that often get abandoned (and I’ve been responsible for some of them myself).

3

I don’t know if it can help but there exists this initiative