←back to thread

Show HN: Nissan's Leaf app doesn't have a home screen widget so I made my own

(kevintechnology.com)
122 points kcon | 2 comments | 14 Apr 25 02:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.475s | source

Nissan's official mobile app for their LEAF electric car doesn't have a widget for quickly checking the car's battery charge status on your phone's home screen, so for a fun side project I decided to make my own using free tools like GitHub Actions, Appium, Tailscale, and Apple Shortcuts.
1. aprilthird2021 ◴[14 Apr 25 04:49 UTC] No.43678149[source]▶
Cool! I like that it just works ™ and is a lot more resilient to the hostile first party than other approaches.

How often does the scraping of the app running on the RaspPi run and how much is the lag between that job running and the data appearing on your phone?

replies(1): >>43678237 #
2. kcon ◴[14 Apr 25 05:06 UTC] No.43678237[source]▶
Thanks! The IFTTT widget can supposedly update within a few seconds of receiving the triggering email since this is a “real-time applet” (https://help.ifttt.com/hc/en-us/articles/4412435510171-What-...), but in practice it seems to update more on the order of several minutes after the scraping workflow runs.

I have been running the scraping workflow once per hour during waking hours the past week, but I reduced that recently because I was starting to feel nervous (but without any real evidence) that pinging the car too often could drain the 12V battery.

The scraping workflow takes between 2-3 minutes to run. You can view the history and duration of runs here if you’re curious: https://github.com/kevincon/nissan-leaf-widget-updater/actio...