Hi everyone,
Just joined this community and posted my first question. Thought it would be fun to introduce me and my system too. Hope you share that idea 
I’m a bit of a gadgeteer so I’ve gone a bit wild. The heart is the usual Raspberry Pi but I combined it with some electronics to be able to signals over internet cables (the usual PWM, Digital, Analogue). Some of them are combined with internet (of course losing speed to 100 mbit because you steal 4 wires). To prevent chaos I reused a broken switch which has all of the required connectors and makes up for a nice casing. Since there was room to spare I also included a harddrive for a NAS. Last but nog least using the USB it’s connected to the power meter and Zigbee devices. As a trusty component it should have a trusty name, so I called it the HAL9000 
And placed in the electricity cabinet it looks like this
It’s use mostly by voice command but to have some extra fun I also included a dashboard with graphs and buttons. Maybe inevitable because I work as a BI specialist…
So now I working my way through openHAB to expand the system. It’s not always as easy as I hoped but I found some great examples on this forum. And created my first widget and used open API’s to get the weather and the buss timetable close to my home on the dashboard. A little less open was getting the data from my solar system (envoy), but on internet I found a guy who hacked to local API from the device. Worked like a charm. And of course, all that programming needs some soldering to compensate. So using ESP’s I created a MP3 doorbell and multi-light switch that the HAL can control.
Some of my solutions looks a bit over-complicated, so maybe more questions will come. But I’m also the type, if it works it works. Well enough for now, I had some fun writing this down. No idea if these openHAB stories are actually read…
) off-topic. I’m working in the government creating information about projects, think hours and money spent and results accomplished (milestones/ user stories completed or incidents solved). But to see trends and relations it’s a lot of visuals, graphs and the meters are great for KPI’s or SLA’s. So that reminded me while making the openHAB dashboard. But of course it’s all enterprise tools like Powercenter (ETL) and Business Objects. And Java, Knime, R-Studio for the things need to be derived from patterns. And Kibana for the real-time information. No openHAB in the office 
were killed for this)