aWATTar binding: Beta and discussion

Wolfgang1966 · January 8, 2022, 12:25pm

Hi @christoph_kowatschik , could it be that you tested the binding after 12:00 today?

For your Things 2, 5 and 6 this means that they are already in the past for today and the prices for tomorrow are not yet available as it is not yet 14:00. Things 3 and 7 should have become undef after 13:00 also, as then their period was over.

After 14:00 the things should show data again for tomorrow.

Yours

Wolfgang

christoph_kowatschik · January 8, 2022, 12:47pm

Hi Wolfgang, thx a lot for the quick answer … this might explain why during testing I was wondering why one combination was working an hour ago and now run into UNDEF …

Gunnar-K · January 24, 2022, 6:32pm

Hi! (Newbie question), any plans to modify the binding to work with Nordpool? I`m able to get the prices pr hour with this, but the rest of the work is above my newbie skills at the moment…

Gunnar

Gunnar-K · January 27, 2022, 8:16pm

Downloaded the .jar file into the addons folder, copied the .things and .items from the example into aWATTar.items and aWATTar.things files in my things and items folder, but so far no binding or things show up. I can see the items in the UI, but I get this error message when opening an item:
Invalid Link
awattar:prices:bridge1:price1:current#market-gross

Wolfgang1966 · January 28, 2022, 6:36am

Hi @Gunnar-K

Regarding NordPool: Not from my side at the moment. I opened the PR to get the binding into the openHAB distro; when this is done, maybe somebody is willing to add Nordpool as data source or fork a Nordpool binding from it.

Regarding your problem when opening an item: Maybe there is something written to the openHAB log file (openhab.log), did you check there?

Gunnar-K · January 28, 2022, 10:08am

Thanks! The log shows that the awattar.things is loaded, but it doesn`t tell me alot. Is there anything else that I need to do, besides copying the bindingfile.jar into my addons folder, and adding the .items and .things files? Maybe something with the bridge thing? I have used the openhabian-config to fix file permissions.

I thought maybe it would be possible to replace the channels in the awattar.items-file with my MQTT-channels from Nordpool?

Gunnar-K · January 28, 2022, 7:05pm

Hm… the karaf console doesn`t show aWATTar as installed at all.

Wolfgang1966 · March 12, 2022, 10:34am

Hi @Gunnar-K , sorry for the very late response. I somehow completely missed your latest posts.

Ok, if the binding is not shown as installed this at least explains why you don’t see anything. Did you check openhab.log for error messages, especially after a restart of openHAB?

Wolfgang1966 · May 2, 2022, 6:35am

Dear all, thanks for feedback and testing.

The Pull request is now merged, the aWATTar binding will be part of the openHAB distro with the next release.

Please be aware that the bridge name in the config changed, so you will have to adapt your config when switching from Beta to the final version.

Yours

Wolfgang

Doug_Culnane · May 16, 2022, 8:28am

@Wolfgang1966 thanks for this binding. I plan to change from Verbund to aWattar but I needed to program a binding first. So thank for removing this barrier and solving the problem for me.

One question the awattar.things here: aWATTar - Bindings | openHAB

The “Heat pump” [ consecutive=“false” ] ? and the “Car Loader” [consecutive=“true” ] seams incorrect to me. It could be that i do not understand the binding properly yet or is there a mistake?

To me a heat pump need consecutive hours and a car charger does not?

Thanks again.

Wolfgang1966 · May 16, 2022, 11:02am

Hi Doug,

those were just examples. The ideas behind are:

We have large water tank that stores hot water, so the heat pump should fill it up during cheap hours. If there are breaks in between, it causes no harm.
When the car is charged, it also warms up the battery (especially in Winter). So if you interrupt the charging, the battery will cool down and needs to be warmed up later again.

However, depending on your setup, things may be totally different.

Be aware that the configuration for the final binding looks a little bit different to the betas I uploaded here. So if you used the betas, you will have to adapt the config when switching to the final version with openHAB 3.3

Wolfgang1966 · May 16, 2022, 11:43am

Dear all,

thanks for your tests and feedback. The binding PR is merged now and the binding will be part of openHAB 3.3. It is already part of the latest milestone build.

The naming of the bridge changed, so you need to adapt your config slightly when switching from beta to final.

Yours

Wolfgang

Doug_Culnane · May 16, 2022, 7:29pm

Hi @Wolfgang1966

Thanks for your answer it now makes sense. I thought I had found a bug in the README but maybe it is a bug in my understanding.

In my understanding heat pumps need to run for a few hours to be efficient and car chargers dynamically soak up the available energy (with a 300 watt fix overhead). However I am still learning to match consumption to production most effectively.

Thanks for the binding I hope to use it effectively soon.

martingwb · October 10, 2022, 6:54am

Hi,
I am new to openhab and would like to use the awattar binding but looks like I am missing something about “creating the bridge thing”. I have created a thing with the awattar binding - which is “offline” - and clicking on bridge opens a section with a radio button and nothing else.
Any help is appreciated. Thank you!
kr,
Martin

Wolfgang1966 · October 10, 2022, 7:22am

Hi Martin,

the bridge needs to know whether you need the prices for DE or AT.

For me it looks like this in the openHAB GUI:

If I try to add a new thing manually, I see this:

and clicking on aWATTar bridge this:

How does it look like in your browser?

Yours

Wolfgang

martingwb · October 10, 2022, 8:12am

Hi Wofgang,
Thank you for your reply.
btw, I am using OH 3.3 (on a rpi).
What could be the reason for not having the bridge item displayed at all?

Wolfgang1966 · October 10, 2022, 8:47am

My installation is still on 3.2.

Give me some time to update to 3.3 so that I can check whether it has something to do with the version.

Do you see any messages in openhab.log?

martingwb · October 10, 2022, 11:48am

Thank you for checking.

sorry, nothing in there about aWATTar … apart from “… changed from UNKNOWN to ONLINE”

Doug_Culnane · October 11, 2022, 4:51pm

I use openHAB 3.4.M2 and I can not add the bridge with the UI (same as @martingwb reports). I have to add it in a file: openhab/conf/things/awattar.things as per the documentation.

BTW: @Wolfgang1966 this binding is awesome. I did not understand the design at first but having tried to develop my own logic it became clear this this binding does it in a really useable way. Thanks for contributing it.

Wolfgang1966 · October 12, 2022, 5:40am

If the binding states it is online, then … well … it is most probably online . However, I wonder why it is not displayed in the GUI correctly.

In my home installation I configured it using the GUI, and it is displayed correctly. During development I most of the time used config files for testing.

I updated to openHAB 3.3 now and it still displays the bridge correctly

The java version currently used is:

openjdk version "11.0.16" 2022-07-19
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 11.0.16+8-post-Ubuntu-0ubuntu120.04)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.0.16+8-post-Ubuntu-0ubuntu120.04, mixed mode)

I will try to reproduce the problem with a clean installation on my local machine (my productive system runs on a rockpro64 board), but that may take some time. In the meantime, if configuring the binding in a file works, then please use this as a workaround.

@Doug_Culnane Thank you