Developing Environment

Develop on a Linux box or a Mac. It makes things easier. You can develop on the Raspberry Pi, but its too slow. If you don't have a Linux or Mac running (how can you?) then I suggest to use VirtualBox and install a Ubuntu.

Install Node.js

You need to install or update to the LTS version of Node.js (version 4.4.5 at the time of writing). Earlier versions of Node.js aren't supported.

Setup pimatic for development

mkdir pimatic-dev
npm install pimatic --prefix pimatic-dev

to install the pimatic framework.

Copy the default config file:

cd pimatic-dev
cp ./node_modules/pimatic/config_default.json ./config.json

You should end up with this in your pimatic-dev directory:

Debug outputs

You should add these options to the settings section of your config.json to get debug outputs

"debug": true,
"logLevel": "debug"

Editor / IDE Setup

Coffeescript is whitespace sensitive, so make sure to use the following editor settings:

• tab size: 2
• translate tabs to spaces: true
• max line length: 100

I'm using sublime text as a editor. An example project config would be:

{
  "folders":
  [
    {
      "path": "."
    }
  ],
  "settings":
  {
    "tab_size": 2,
    "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,
    "rulers": [100]
  }
}

If you use sublime then install BetterCoffee.