Control An Onion Omega2 IoT Device With Websocket Communication

I’ve been all about websockets lately. Up until recently RESTful APIs have been my whole world, but they don’t accomplish everything and what they do accomplish may not be the best fit. Not too long ago I got my Onion Omega2 Internet of Things (IoT) device with a bunch of accessories and I’ve been playing around with them non-stop. Previously I had written about displaying system information on the OLED expansion, but I wanted to take it to the next level and display data received through a websocket.

Realistically you probably wouldn’t use a websocket to display data on an IoT OLED screen, but it opens the door to new possibilities. More specifically in the realm of home automation and anything else that needs to be very responsive or real-time. For example, what if you wanted to turn on the lights in your house, but are working with a low bandwidth and low spec IoT device that can’t process large RESTful payloads very fast. The Onion Omega2 is an example of such device and while we’re not going to explore home automation in this example, we’re going to see how to do websocket communication.

Display System Information On The Onion Omega2 OLED Expansion

So I was a recent Kickstarter backer for the Onion Omega2 Internet of Things (IoT) device. My package finally came and I wanted to see what I can do with it. My package included the Omega2, expansion dock, and OLED display so I figured it would be cool to write an application that displayed to the screen.

A problem I always had with the Raspberry Pi, my other favorite IoT device, is that I never knew the IP address or system information because I was always using it as a headless unit. With that in mind, I decided to write an application that displayed this information to the Onion Omega2 OLED screen at boot.

We’re going to see how to write a basic script to show system information using Python and the OLED extension library.