Writing loads of error messages to the log and letting the user check the output is not nice and may cause dislike! Therefore, I would like to suggest a kind of “lastError” state for a device which shall be visualized as part of the device display (see mockup below).

  • If lastError is set, an icon will displayed, e.g. a warning sign, to indicate that the device display does not necessarily highlight the current device status and some error has occurred. The device popup could be used to give details on the last error message occurred.
  • If lastError is not set, nothing should be be displayed.

To keep it simply, my suggestion is to let lastError be of type String. An empty String indicates no error. A text indicates the last error message and should be visualized by the error icon.

mockup

Edit: There is a relationship to http://forum.pimatic.org/topic/20/make-pimatic-able-to-display-our-own-icons-into-the-ui and my understanding is that custom icons display is under development. However, I would like to see the rendering of the lastError state as a standard feature of the pimatic frontend. Similar to battery-level, I guess.