[neato] How to extend/improve Neato support

Development Add-ons
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1

Having a Neato D7 Connected myself, I’d like to improve the Neato support to include

  • auto-discovery of secret (similar to #4185 - Add option to find secret)
  • map based cleaning (similar to #5761 - Add housecleaning with map (category 4))

Doing some upfront research I also see opportunity to improve support for Vorwerk robots (although I cannot test it), add extra feedback with cleaning maps and utilise APIs documented by Neato themselves.

All this would require to change the configuration parameters incompatible with the existing plugin. The following strategies have crossed my mind:

  • build/create a separate neato-v2 plugin?
  • add as separate binding next inside the existing plugin
  • change the existing plugin breaking existing configurations.

What would be your advise for the strategy?

2

If the incompatible is only a few configuration parameters than creating a separate binding would be a bad idea imoh.
So breaking existing configuration would be the way to go if that is an improvement. Although making breaking changes might mean it will have to be targeted for OH3. But it depends very much on what kind of breaking changes it are I think.
But my suggestion would be to directly contact the developer of the binding to discuss this and also open a GitHub is with your proposed (breaking) changes so you can get specific feedback on what action to take.