sending and receiving from websocket host

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Hey,

I have just recently hacked my robot vacuum cleaner with an ESP8622 on it’s serial interface to be able to controll it remotely (and automated).
I used this project on the ESP: https://github.com/sstadlberger/botvac-wifi
I can call the url and send/receive commands on it’s console:

Next step is to send commands from pimatic, but my knowledge about websockets ends at this point. I know that the ESP is listening for a websocket connection on port 81, but I don’t know how to send a request via shell or how to read the answer. Can anyone help me with some tips?

Hey there,

I kind of solved it. Maybe someone can help improve or use it for their own usecase.
I installed a command line tool for websockets called wscat (https://github.com/websockets/wscat). I can connect to my neato using wscat -c ws://[IP]:81 and send commands like on the web console via my browser.
After reading the help of wscat I also know how to directly send commands. For example, using wscat -c ws://[IP]:81 -x 'setschedule on` will connect to my bot, enable the schedule for daily cleaning and report back to stdout. It will need some tinkering and trail and error to filter the important parts of the answer to be displayed in pimatic, but in general it works.

well I’m a little confused… maybe a linux pro can help…
I tried to use grep to get only one line of the output, but that didn’t worked. As in the example above I tried to check for an activated schedule by using wscat -c ws://[IP]:81 -x 'getschedule' | grep 'is' to only get the line ‘Schedule is Enabled (or Disabled)’, but I still receive the complete response as in my first post. I also tried grep with is and "is" with the same result.

@anduril coult it be that wscat parses as a single line? This would result in spitting everything out because IS is in that single line. Could you post some screenshots of your terminal after entering the command?