Experience at setting up openhab in classroom environment

I’m a community college teacher and we are building a Home Automation course. This is only our second year teaching the course and we keep tweaking it as we go. This year I have added openHab and I will use this thread to update the progress that we make within the class as we go along.

Background: Our course content includes both off the shelf system configuration and custom Arduino/microcontroller based system. We have been working with a Honeywell system and a couple of Vera’s (Vera Light and G100) with multiple Z-Wave and Wemo devices.

So far, our students have completed the following on OH1.8 :
-Configured 2 servers on Raspberry Pi
-Added the control of various Wemo devices (some issues encountered with Maker and Motion)
-Added the control of local GPIO on the RPi (Quick and easy) :slight_smile:
-Added rules to control items based on schedule (Check out cronmaker.com) :slight_smile:

I have also configured a server at home running on Linux Mint 17.3 on a laughable Acer aspire One D270 netbook and I’m totally impressed with the performance. That netbook was ready for garbage with the original Windows home edition and was totally revived with Linux and now serves a very useful purpose. :smile:

What we also want to implement are the following:
-Read GPIO input
-Create rule based on GPIO input
-Add local audio control (Play music on RPi or PC running OH)
-Add remote access from web (my.openhab.org)
-If time permits maybe play with IFTTT

This will probably bring us to the end of the semester for this year :cry: We’ll continue our development next September.

However I will continue to develop my home system and keep learning and documenting as I go.

Looking forward to learn more…

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Hello, this sounds very interesting and I wish you and your students tons of fun :wink:
One thing you might need to be aware of: MIgration to OpenHab2

For your work with Raspberry Pis (but also your personal laptop) openHABian might be interesting to you.