ouimeaux: Command line and Python API for WeMo hacking

I bought a bunch of Belkin WeMo Switches over Christmas, and while I appreciate that my lights now have IP addresses, controlling them can really only be done through the WeMo iPhone app, which (besides having a few understandable bugs) is slow to start up. More to the point, I had no way to hook the switches up to any other events beyond using IFTTT, which seems to have a one-switch limit.

Luckily, WeMo devices appear to provide a fairly complete SOAP API. Isaac Kelly posted a proof of concept discovering and controlling switches, so obviously more direct control was possible. Hacking together a decent library only took a couple of nights.

Thus: ouimeaux. It uses gevent for async I/O and the minimal UPnP functionality required (broadcasting M-SEARCH requests, listening for responses), and it uses requests to communicate directly with the devices. Service stubs are built on the fly and provide easy attribute access to actions (for example, switch.basicevent.SetBinaryState(BinaryState=1)). There's also a handy explain() method to print out all services, actions and arguments. The only useful things I had time to figure out how to do—turn switches on and off, get current switch state—I pulled up into methods on the switch object itself: switch.on(), switch.off(), switch.get_state(). The documentation gives more details.

Once that was written, a simple command line script was straightforward. Installing the package will get you the wemo script in your PATH. wemo list to discover names of devices, wemo switch "Switch Name" on to turn it on. Nothing else so far, but it's highly hackable.

I hope to explore the Motion API next, and provide the ability to listen to events from Motion devices. Firmware uploading is exposed too; might be possible to intercept and modify to get an SSH server running.