I’d like to tell my device, from the cloud, “give me a full status report”. This would include things like all the values of attached sensors, actuators, internal application state and so forth. Useful for debugging and problem analysis for a device deployed to a customer.
It would be nice if this was a synchronous RPC-style call, not an asynchronous event: that makes test / debug setups much simpler.
Particle variables seem perfect … except that I don’t know when the firmware is about to read my variable, so I would have to pre-compute my status report. But I can’t do that because such a full status report is fairly expensive, and rarely, if ever, asked for.
So. Unless something like it exists already, I’d like to ask for a
Particle.variable( varName, functionPointer )
method in the firmware, where the firmware invokes my functionPointer when it wants to read the variable, and I return the value of the variable in its return value.
P.S. How does one best make suggestions for how to improve the product?