How to create sensors not tied to pins

[jsiddall]

I am working with some devices that aren't directly tied to pins, yet I would still like to interact with these devices, ideally using NodeManager. An example device is a TTP229 touch sensor. This has 8 or 16 buttons and sends the state changes as serial data over a single data pin. I would like to treat these button presses as inputs to an S_BINARY sensors but at the moment I don't see a way to send sets for a sensor child by anything other than a physical pin.

On the receive side I would like to be able to receive arbitrary data from a controller to, for example, an S_CUSTOM device and then use that data to control the behaviour of the node. I could use the state of the child to do something like reduce the brightness of all the S_DIMMERs on the node.

Is there any way to do this type of thing?

[gohan]

No big issue until you do some manual coding as nodemanager is meant for standard setups and your doesn't look like one.

[jsiddall]

@gohan yes, I certainly could treat these sensors manually but of course that is more work!

I think I will create a feature request on NodeManager to add a "virtual" sensor capability anyway because it would be useful and probably not that hard to build. This concept already exists for things like the battery sensor which has a pin "-1".

Edit: added request for this feature as issue #257.