Can i use OpenHAB for this circuit of mine

Sriram_R · October 14, 2017, 6:56am

First off i’m not an Engineer and i know nothing about Circuit design or coding, i’m sorry if i sound a bit stupid when i post this

A few week back I found this Project on youtube and proceeded to build it
Under this i bought all the components rigged up the circuit and also fed the code in to my Arduino Pro mini. But i ran in to a problem when ordering a Vera (Home Automation) controller the instrument went out of stock and was unavailable in my country and those which are available were way over my budget range . As the variables to run the timer on the irrigation were set via Vera’s . I was unable proceed any further because of this missing instrument.

So i have come here to seek some professional advice from you guys. My first question is.

Can i set the timer value for my switch via OpanHAB just like the guy in the video set it on his Vera software.
Which is the best Hardware that can act as home automation with OpenHAB, i see lot of people on youtube using Raspberry Pie, Should i go for it or do you have any other suggestions
Do i need to construct a gateway between my home automation hardware which has openHAB2 on it and my irrigation circuit system ?

rlkoshak · October 14, 2017, 3:54pm

Almost certainly but not having read the tutorial or watched the video I can’t say for sure. There is a MySensors binding I believe.
Anything as powerful as a RPi 2 or better will work. The RPi is very popular because of the low cost and they are relatively easy to buy most places. There is a project called openHABian that automates the installation and configuration of RPi or any other Debian based Linux. But people also run on Windows PC’s, Macs, old laptop, virtual machines, you name it.
If the irrigation system is not accessible on your network than yes, you will need to build a gateway or add networking capability to your Arduino.

Sriram_R · October 16, 2017, 10:58am

I searched for Rasberry Pi 2 and i see lot of them ranging from 5$ to 40$ can you provide a specific model number which is meant exclusivly for home automation

rlkoshak · October 16, 2017, 1:54pm

There is no such thing. A Raspberry Pi is a general purpose computer.

Look for an purchase one that has a 2 or a three in the name that has the other features you think you need. For example, if you want built in wifi and bluetooth you will want a Raspberry Pi 3 B.

snoekieboe · October 16, 2017, 2:00pm

I have built this one and made it fully functional in openhab using MQTT.
If you want i can post my items, rules and sitemaps for you to use as a place to start from

As you can see from the screenshots below the following features are available:

enable/disable the irrigation system
Configure when to irrigate, and for how long
Configure individual zone based irrigation times
scale all zones (make them all longer/shorter)
take recent rain fall into account (rain threshold)
etc