First Installation on Raspberry PI 2

Hello,
I tried to install the package for the first time via apt-get with some issues; is not very simple … and then there is not procedure to get the designer.

is there anyone to help me … may be with another documentation?

Many thanks
Andrea

The wiki isn’t very clear. There is no apt-get for Designer, you have to manually download and install it. The instructions are here. Download the latest Designer here for your architecture.

Thank you Rick … this evening I will try again.

The Designer is installable in a different machine right? … my Windows examples … it will be the application that via IP manage my Rasp?

Andrea

Designer is absolutely installable on a different machine and according to Kai, the lead developer, it really isn’t designed to run on a constrained machine like a RasPi. However, Designer needs to be able to see your openhab/configurations folder so you either need to share your config folder from your RasPi to the Windows machines on the network or set up folder synchronization somehow (e.g. Dropbox, git server, etc). Once you start Designer, press the tiny folder looking icon in the upper left to browse to the openhab/configuration folder and it will open your existing config. When you make changes to almost any configuration file (except openhab.cfg and logback.xml) openHAB will automatically load the new file.

I’ve seen some threads in the old forum discussing how to get Designer to work with a remote server instance.
Here and here are two examples.

I should also caution you that Designer doesn’t really manage openHAB (e.g. it doesn’t start, stop, provide status, etc). It is more of an editor for the openHAB config files (openhab.cfg, rules files, scripts, items, sitemap, etc).

Hi @powerzap,

if you’re new to openHAB and have little or no programming experience, you should take a look at Habmin.
It has a GUI accessable via your browser where you can configure your items and sitemaps.

Habmin also comes with a graphical rule designer which makes it easy to start.
I suggest to switch to openHAB Designer if you want to start writing more complex rules.

Very good … I downloaded habmin ZIP … now where I put these files into my raspberry?

Did you follow the installation instructions on the main page of the repo?

…but before you do

Have you successfully installed OpenHAB first?

HABmin is an additional thing that will help you set up and manage OpenHAB. But it will not install OpenHAB, you have to do that separately.

What are the issues you are having with APT-GET?

Also what is your general confidence level with messing around in the command line and programing?

I used this guide for my first install, but there are many many guides out there.

http://homeautomationforgeeks.com/openhab.shtml

But please read carefully and don’t rush through and copy and paste everything, for instance the version numbers of the downloads the guide refers to are out of date. So you will have to make sure you use the new numbers.

But if you can get it through a package manager (apt-get) then do it that way.

General advice is to be patient, the learning curve is very steep. Use the openhab google groups (now read only but they have so much information in them) as well as this forum… and google.

Good luck

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Many thanks Sam … I following this guide I installed OpenHAB without issues.

About HABmin the readme file tell to store the package into “webapps/habmin” … I made it these folders under /opt but it doesn’t works.

About OpenHAB Designer I installed it into a different linux box and works fine … now I’m trying to read config file from OpenHAB installation.

Thanks again.
Andrea

HABmin goes in the webapps folder within your openHAB folder. Which does vary but as you used the same guide then that is /opt/openhab/webapps/.

But get the openhab install up and running first :slight_smile:

Enjoy

I used raspberry pi 2 and raspberry pi 3. I tried on raspbian and settled on dietpi. I had difficulty with apt-get instructions on all combinations, which produced a couple of errors related to not being able to retrieve files from sources. I reverted to wget of jar zip files, and this seemed to work well. I have most of my home automation system up, and I am inspired to do more home automation because of the features in openHAB. I documented my installation here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Install-OpenHAB-on-Raspberry-Pi/. I appreciated the help. Thanks.