ELI5 how notifications between modules work and how and where to create them

[reverendz]

@sdetweil

It was working, then I changed a couple things and I can’t get it working again :|

So ideally, I’d like to understand notifications so that I can use an on screen menu to open a keyboard like this.

https://github.com/lavolp3/MMM-Keyboard

I’ve tried to modify pre-existing modules like these:

https://github.com/shbatm/MMM-OnScreenMenu

https://github.com/tjat84/MMM-SystemOptions/

https://github.com/Jopyth/MMM-Buttons

My idea is this: right now, I’ve got my Magic Mirror syncing with my calendar and it’s working pretty well with vdirsyncer.

I’d like to use an on-screen button or something in the EXT3 Calendar module to open a form with a keyboard.

I’d then write event details to the local calendar and then sync back to the cloud calendar.

Generally, it’d be nice to understand how to create buttons to do other functions as shown in https://github.com/shbatm/MMM-OnScreenMenu. The ability show/hide modules and even scroll to a different page using Carousel or Pages would be awesome too.

But I can’t seem to get past step one: send a notification to open the on screen keyboard. So far, I’ve gotten it working exactly once. Then I made a change and it’s failing.

I’m doing

npm start dev and I can see the notification is being sent. However, the keyboard isn’t responding even though I didn’t modify it at all.

Really appreciate the help, I’m real new to all this so just getting it set up with working modules was a win.

[sdetweil]

@reverendz in the developers window (sources tab) you can see the keyboard module source too…
and put a stop on its notificationReceived() function

put a stop on your this.sendNotification() function line

when it stops, use the mouse to hover over the word this… does it look like module info??

there are lots of tricky items to deal with… especially if you have pages running… some modules won’t respond if they are ‘hidden’ by MMM-Pages
so, best is to start bare minimum…

YOU WILL have to create another module to do all this…
I can see using the button to CREATE… doing edit/delete will be harder trying to get to the data in another module. altho you can use JQuery pretty well,
how to get it invoked on that cal entry will be fun… (maybe monkeypatch module???)

there is NO MAGIC here, its all grunt work.

welcome to the fun of learning while developing…

i’ve got a hardware development kit that has left me completely blank wall for about 6 months now…
so I KNOW the feeling…

[sdetweil]

@reverendz i dont want to discourage you from getting this working

you might look at another collection of modules that aim to do the same. see

https://forum.magicmirror.builders/topic/18011/touchscreen-family-dashboard