I understand your frustration and struggles. the community is working furiously to try to address the deficiencies in the documentation but it is slow going and OH itself is growing and changing so quickly that it is hard to keep up. That coupled with the sheer complexity of home automation in general presents a huge barrier that newcomers need to overcome.
I will admit I only scanned the rest of the replies in this thread and reading them more closely as I write this so this posting may be a bit disjoint.
It takes one change. Open services/addons.cfg from your config folder and change package to demo.
Wait a bit and all the bindings and configs that work with the demo will be downloaded and installed.
Now when you open your URL you should see a BasicUI, in addition to PaperUI. when you click on BasicUI you will see the demo sitemap. The file that defines that sitemap is located in sitemaps/demo.sitemap.
The rest of the config that makes that sitemap work are in the other config folders.
SmartThings does have a REST API that can be used to integrate OH with the SmartThings Hub. But there is no SmartThings binding at this time. Also, Zigbee support will be added to OH soon which should allow OH to control those other bulbs.
That is generally true. It is much easier to answer more specific questions than generic questions. Particularly when asking for help with something we generally need to know:
- versions of OH and addons used
- detailed description of the problem
- Items, Rules, and other relevant config files
- logs
- what has already been tried to solve the problem.
“Help it doesn’t work” type questions often do not get much of a response because we don’t have enough information to help and it is no fun playing 20 questions trying to extract all the needed information to even begin to help.
However, in @tdsheppard77’s case, this is one of those generic questions that should be answered and I see several attempts at answers here. The fact the answers were not satisfying is a different thing entirely.
Its a pain and I think there is an issue for this. As @Udo_Hartmann described, click on the type on the tree in the left and press <crtl>n and the new dialog file will come up.
If you created a new file outside of Designer, click on the folder and select your config file again and everything will be reloaded.
It is a pain. It shouldn’t be this way.
So here is one problem you will face that is partially caused by the fact that OH is in transition from version 1 to version 2 right now. Version 2 has a new architecture and a whole new way to write add-ons. But Version 2 has backwards compatibility with 1.x version add-ons. This results in two different ways that Things and Items need to be created and managed.
Version 2 stuff can all be created and managed within PaperUI. For those addons that have not yet been rewritten for OH 2 everything must be managed in the old OH 1.x way in the text files. Hue happens to be one such add-on.
For all 1.x verison addons you need to look at the OH 1.x wiki for documentation on how to configure and create Items bound to that Item.
Now that I have that out of the way, you will only see something in the Control Link on PaperUI for Things that come from 2.0 version bindings.
What is the name of this sitemap file and where is it located? When you start openHAB do you see anything in openhab.log? If you installed using apt-get (preferred) that is located in /var/log/openhab2/openhab.log I think.
Are there Items and Groups defined for all of the Items that appear in that Sitemap?
The fact that nothing came up in BasicUI indicates there is an error somewhere.
Awesome!
@tdsheppard77, @Daniel_Hermann1, @erland_lestander, being relatively new to OH, can you post here or PM me privately what you would have like to have seen in a New User Getting Started Tutorial?
The documentation team knows full well such a tutorial is sorely needed and some recommendations about what such a tutorial should contain and how it should be presented would be useful.
Has an Issue been filed on github yet?
As for debugging, the best I can offer is to look at what systemctl status openhab2 returns. The bottom will contain the last few lines that OH printed out before it died.
You can also look in /var/log/syslog (grep for lines that contain “openhab”) and see what it is printing out when it tries to come up.
Have you tried to start it by hand using the start.sh script?