Directions for openHAB 3

There has already a Tutorials and Solutions category where postings like this would go. Sorry if patrolling the category and deleting posts that don’t fit I can’t see how we can limit it.

If you search the firm for Tasmota you will find more than one tutorial telling you how to use it with OH. For example, Using Sonoff Power Switches with Tasmota firmware and openHAB2 MQTT2 binding

Also, there are literally tens of thousands of supported devices, and that’s just counting the commercially available ones. There is a near infinity of devices if you count DIY ones like an ESP8266. You want a separate end to end tutorial for them all? That’s just not feasible.

What is feasible is what we have. General purpose documentation that covers the common stuff, specific documentation in the binding docs, and tutorials on the forum that various users have volunteered to post.

In my experience we can avoid 90% of of them but then 90% of those get replaced with new beginner questions. That’s kind of what I meant by the quote. We still have a net gain of 10% so it is well worth doing. But especially for a system as open ended and complex as OH, we will never get it down to 100% intuitive and easy to figure out by the new users.

I totally agree. Don’t think I’m arguing against the proposed improvements. It’s just that I don’t see them as being a complete solution because a complete solution to avoiding beginner’s questions because that is impossible.

True, but when you are taking on DIY sensors and electronics you are in many ways stepping outside the scope of OH, at least in terms of what support you can expect from this forum. We are not generally DIY electronics experts (though there are many on this forum) and there is a near infinity of ways to build and connect them. To just list the popular ones I’ve seen mentioned on this forum:

  • MySensors
  • Tasmota using MQTT
  • ESPEasy using MQTT
  • Tasmota using HTTP (I can’t remember if ESPEasy has HTTP)
  • Serial connection to Arduino
  • custom written firmware
  • Raspberry Pi (or other SBC) with Python scripts

That’s seven different ways to connect a single DHT22’s reading to OH, and the last two could actually expand to dozens depending on how the developers decide to have OH communicate with it. That’s just the commonly used ones. Which one should we build the end to end tutorial around?

Can there be end to end tutorials, of course. The Beginner’s Tutorial is supposed to be that and there are several others posted to the Tutorials and Solutions category. Can we ever cover an end to end tutorial for every possible combination of sensors and actuators? No. We can’t even built a complete list of supported devices. The list is constantly growing. It would never be complete.

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