Which doc is this? I don’t think I’m familiar with this particular tutorial. Is it part of the official docs (i.e. Introduction | openHAB)? We don’t really have control over anything outside the OH project itself.
The complexity of home automation is often vastly underestimated. There are hundreds of siloed and incompatible technologies, tens of thousands of devices, and everyone’s requirements for home automation are almost completely unique.
openHAB compromises on simplicity but provides almost limitless possibilities when it comes to automation. But as a consequence, very simple things can be more complex than they otherwise could be (a lot of work has been and continue to be done to improve that). But the benefit is if you can code it, you can probably do it from an automation perspective.
If you are mainly looking for unified control over all your devices with a nice interface, HA might be a better choice but you give up some flexibility in automation capabilities.
If you are looking for automation, openHAB is IMO the best option out there. For an example of the sorts of automations people are doing with OH you can look in the Tutorials and Solutions section of the forum.
One common example is using the future price of energy coupled with the output from PV systems to schedule when/if to run the washing machine and drier.
My family’s favorite automation is on school days our smart speakers will announce when we need to leave in order to get the kid to school on time gien current driving conditions.
My most impactful automation is getting an alert if the motion sensor at my dad’s house doesn’t detect motion for too long a time.
It’s automations like these which combine three+ technologies and APIs to perform some action or actions automatically where OH really shines. But it’s the simpler stuff like turning on a light at the same time every day, where it is a bit more complex than the alternatives. If you don’t expect to grow beyond simple automations like these, openHAB may not be the best choice for your needs.
To steal from Neil Stephenson’s “In the Beginning…Was the Command Line”, openHAB is like Linux, a free tank. Not everyone is willing to learn to drive the tank, but the possibilities are limitless if you do.
Probably not and really, you don’t. But you have to know what the right pages to read are.
The way the official docs are designed, to most quickly get you up to this specific automation would be:
- https://www.openhab.org/docs/concepts/: If you don’t know the difference between and purpose of an Item, a Thing, and a Rule you are going to have a hard time with the rest of the docs.
- Getting Started - Introduction | openHAB and https://www.openhab.org/docs/tutorial/first_steps.html: Get OH up an running
- Adding Things - Simple | openHAB, or Adding Things - Intermediate | openHAB, or https://www.openhab.org/docs/tutorial/things_advanced.html: Get your first Thing(s) discovered or created. The first one covers the fully discoverable type technologies, the second one covers the most common case where one must first manually create a Thing (e.g. to connect to a USB dongle) which, once created, will discover all the devices. The third is for those technologies where dsicovery isn’t possible, Which is the right page to read? We can’t know, we don’t know which technologies you are using.If we only support the simple case in a quick start, anyone who doesn’t have such a technology is left out completely.
- https://www.openhab.org/docs/tutorial/model.html: Create your Items. Items are the way OH interacts with devices.
- https://www.openhab.org/docs/tutorial/rules_basic.html: If you read 1, you can probably skip Rules - Introduction | openHAB and Rules - Other Technologies | openHAB but simply toggling a Switch at certain times of day only requires simple rules. You don’t even need Blockly.
The challenge though is if your goal is to be able to toggle a light on or off from a UI, it’s a different set of pages that should be read. You’d skip the rules pages and read a couple of the UI pages depending on how you want to see it. If you want to see a chart on the UI of your temperature, it would be yet a different set of pages that are relevant. We want to support all of these users though, so it’s hard.
