First hour question - sorry! Add a Sonoff Thing

I have just set up a RPi 4 with the openhabian image from the RPi image repository. I have it running, added my ID, location etc.

The first Thing I want to add is the Sonoff capability. I found the Github page (GitHub - delid4ve/openhab-3.x-sonoff: Openhab Binding for Sonoff Devices) and the author says “Add an ‘Account’ thing and configure.”

Where will I find how to add an “Account” thing?

Bear in mind this is my first hour of OpehHab …

Thanks
Bruce

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Welcome to OH!

“Thing” in this case is a specific OH term referring to the objects which allow you to interact with specific bindings.

You may find it helpful to go through the getting started tutorial to see all these terms in action:

It may also help to refer to this glossary on occasion while you’re getting the terminology down:

Thanks guys.
I had been through the “Getting Started” guide. The only example in “Adding Things - Advanced” is adding a link to MQTT (I will need that later!) but I thought I would start with something simpler - hence Sonoff (most of my IoT Things are Sonoff / Wifi).

I found the Things - “+” - Install Bindings - openHAB and community - but there is no Sonoff binding. Hence the search which led me to the Github page, but my question remains the same…

Where will I find how to add an “Account” thing?

I know that openHAB is open source and developed and “supported” by contributors, but I am fairly experience (40 years in IT, 20 odd on Unix (now Linux) but I am at the classic “newbie” stage with openHAB where I haven’t caught on to the terminology yet.

I know you can see it and with experience the answer will be obvious, but right now it’s a complete block …
Help me get over the first hurdles, please
Thanks
Bruce

If you still haven’t installed the binding, then that’s another issue. This binding, it appears, hasn’t been added to the marketplace or the official list, which is why you didn’t find it in the bindings page on the UI. To install additional bindings such as these you need to have a complete jar file and place that jar file in the /addons directory in the OH configuration directory. It should be automatically detected.

In this case, it looks like the jar files are available on the forum thread for the project:

Are your sonoff devices still using their original firmware, i.e. have you not flashed them with tasmota or esphome or something else?

Hi JimT, my Sonoff devices are all “stock” firmware. When I bought them I thought I may well re-flash them, but they work well and the Sonoff eWeLink app works well.

The eWeLink software works well with Home Assistant and Google Home, so I am not going to change that.

I have a bunch of Wemos D1 Minis that I use to capture temperature (and some humidity) data and that feeds to NodeRed via MQTT.

I also have several RPis doing little automation tasks - again using C or Python and MQTT to retrieve data. For them I use an app called MQTT Dash for remote access.

My hope is that I can use openHAB as an automation platform to bring it all together and add some Zigbee (or Matter) devices, but so far the learning curve / availability of examples is not looking good.

Thanks for your response
Bruce