Categories

I’m working on creating my REAL model now. Things are going well.

Except - Laundry Room. There is a Laundry Room Semantic Class. But no Category (at least not in American English?) that matches. Is it possible to add a laundryroom Category? Or what do others do for this?

Oops. Nothing for Dining Room either.

Category is kind of a meaning property. All it really does is control the openHAB Icon that represents the Item in places where a MainUI Widget isn’t/cannot be used.

There is work in OH 4 to expand the list from just OH built in icons to include everything that MainUI supports (Material, iconify, etc), but it still is pretty much only used in three places:

  1. Settings → Items
  2. Sitemaps when the icon is not overridden in the sitemap
  3. right hand panel when a single Item is selected in Settings → Model

That’s it. Beyond that it has no meaning. And since all it does is choose this icon in those places, you can add your own new categories by following Items | openHAB.

What they are called is pretty much irrelevant.

Note: in OH 4 if you do use non-OH built in icons for the category, I don’t think they support being dynamic (i.e. show a different icon based on the state of the Item) but I’ve not explored this new feature yet so can’t say so for sure.

Because these Items pretty much have little meaning outside of the model, I tend not to really care what category the Locations and Equipment Items use. The default widgets are more important as that’s what the end users of the home automation will see.

Thanks. Except for that, I’m getting a pretty good handle on the rest of the stuff and how/where it is used at the basic level now.