Belkin killed my smart switch. I got it working again without their app
I wanted to use the switch to automate my mosquito repellent. Unfortunately it still had my timer running from Christmas, which meant it turned off too early. It ruined my last night's sleep.
First thing in the morning I opened the app and wanted to change the timer.
The app was offline and I read online that it is discontinued. The switch is basically garbage now.
I was pissed at first, but then I gave my AI agent the following prompt:
"Find the wifi switch in my local network. The app is end of life. Try to connect to it and change the timer to 22:00 ON until 8am"
A few minutes later it told me that it was done.
I let it explain how it did it.
It found the device on the network and found an open protocol so it could quickly turn it on and off.
It dug deeper and found pywemo, an open source library that let it read the saved timer from the device.
It made a backup of the existing timer by itself.
Then it used the library to push the new timer to the device. This meant that even without wifi or my computer, the switch worked autonomously.
I am a programmer and I could have done this too, but I think it would have taken me at least a day to put this all together. It did it all in a few minutes.
I am really happy that Belkin turned off their crappy app. It was not a good user experience anyway.
I can now just chat with my switch on Discord through my Hermes agent.