Hi Blynk team,
I am wondering if there has been any consideration to disable buttons or “grey them out” when the hardware is offline? I could see this as being a useful functionality for the app when either there is a power cycle or general power loss. The user would not be able to click the button at all when this happens, and it would indicate to them that the device is offline.
Please let me know if this has already been done, but I was trying to find an existing solution and have not encountered anything so far in the Blynk app.
In the Blynk app on the top right you have a microcontroller icon. If the device is offline it shows how many devices are offline with a number badge. By this the user can make out which device is offline and at what time it went offline. But the virtual buttons are still functional, it will not grey out.
May be in the upcoming version of Blynk that is Blynk 2.0 this feature may be added.
I’d say that this could get very messy.
Imagine a scenario where you have 10 devices within one project and two of them go offline. Some widgets will be connected to pins on the offline devices and these could be greyed-out, but what about scenarios where Device Selector or Device Tiles are used?
Also, in some situations (deep sleep for example) its actually desirable/essential for widget values to be changed whilst the device is offline, so that the device can pick these up and use them when it wakes-up an ‘phones home’ for a status update.
Pete.
Thanks Pete, that makes sense there would be some situations where this would not be helpful (Device Selector or Tiles mainly comes to mind).
I suppose it’s more of a question of building in the option in case it is helpful. So the app designer would need to plan out if they wanted to consider the functionality for each button, and you would not be able to use it if you are also using tiles, for example. I’d happily add the functionality in my own Blynk app but I don’t think Blynk has that language-level editing capability on the app side 