Discovering OpenHAB

I am a beginner with OpenHAB. I discovered it online three days ago, ordered a Z-Stick gen 5 and an Intel NUC to give it a try.
I am not new to home automation however, having run a VeraLite for about a year.
I found that the Vera did the job but that its reliance on having an Internet connection, the rather dreadful Android App and its constant loss of direct connectivity were a bother. I addressed these latter points by writing my own Android App to directly communicate with the box at a fixed IP.
I just set up a quick test of OpenHAB on my Mac and I am impressed. The web interface from the phone is more than useable already! Congratulations to the developers.

The biggest difficulty I had were with getting the Z-Wave going. Essentially, I had forgotten to copy the Z-Wave binding jar to the correct folder.
It would be nice to have a tutorial that would guide someone who has a Z-Wave stick, some test equipment to introduce them in the demo house.
But otherwise, I am pleased. I will continue to expand the set of devices I switch to OpenHAB from the Vera.

Welcome aboard (another person jumping off the Vera route - I had a Vera for a couple of years, but moved to OH over 2 years back)…

I appreciate that the zwave binding isn’t the easiest to understand as it does require some low level knowledge of zwave. I’m not aware of a good tutorial on this (although someone else might point one out), but the wiki has a lot of information on configuring the binding (although you’ve probably already seen that) and there is also this post with some example configurations. The other resource is to do a search in the old google group forum.

In the OH2 zwave binding, configuration will be a LOT easier :smile:

Chris

1 Like

Thanks for the welcome, Chris. Is OH2 something stable enough to start playing with it? Are there big missing pieces if the only systems I want right now are all Z-Wave based?

Unfortunately, the zwave binding for OH2 isn’t quite available yet - hopefully very soon, but it might still be a couple of weeks away as there are a few enhancements I need to do to the SmartHome core to allow it to configure some parts of zwave devices…

You can run the OH1 zwave binding under OH2, but of course that doesn’t help with your configuration issues…

Oh, my zwave configuration issues were very basic. I did not know how to find the correct device numbers for the plug-in switches I had paired with the z-stick. The Wiki mentioned that it could be found in the log output when starting OpenHAB. But since I had not copied the jar, I did not see any zwave-related output! :wink:
So I tried the other way that the wiki mentions. The open-zwave way. I compiled it on the mac, compiled open-zwave-control-panel and it would fail doing anything with the stick…It was late and I was getting frustrated, wondering if the stick had something wrong… :grimacing:

Then a light switch went on in my head! :smile: I realized I needed to copy the jar.
Once that was done, I did see the output in the log, added a line in my items and was off to a working test!
Seriously well done system, where adding one line in the list of items does everything necessary to have it appear in the interface. As I said, I am impressed and happy!

Welcome @funmiles You are of course encouraged to contribute to the documentation. If you feel that something wasn’t clear or spelled out, you can edit the wiki.