Here is the background …
All I wanted to do was turn on a sprinkler on the other side of the drive way, and so I discovered Arduino.
Not having done any hobby electronic work for a while, this piqued my interest.
So a breadboard and some modules later I have IDE installed and I can upload scratch files into the Nano and run simple scripts.
From the modules I purchased I built this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFk06lgT4Bg. OK… more than just turning on/off one sprinkler, but I can see where this is going to end up!! And although it’s the other side of the driveway, I will use a standard wireless access point to get to it. Unfortunately I did not purchase any ESP8266, so I will work with what I have got for the moment.
So how to control it Automatically.
Oh dear… look at this Openhab I discovered… Way overkill for what I want to do but, look at all this cool stuff… and I just so happen to have a Raspberrypi 3. And Openhab prebuilt image looks like it will be easy to get it all going. Then I can remote other stuff in the house as well.
SO I get Openhab onto thePi, and I have access to openhabpi.local. I read the docs and can grasp the Items/Bindings/Action/Things concepts. It’s taken me a week and some late nights to get this far.
Now, to get the Openhab to talk to the Arduino. I figured there would be some way in Openhab to make a rule to access a web page, because you can turn on/off a sprinkler easily by issueing a 192.168.1.111/?ArduinoPIN3=on just in a browser.
HELP 1 : Can’t find it !! so just for academic sake (I can see I won’t be satisfied with this one way control), how would you go about that in Openhab?
Another two nights of reading an I see I need Mosquitto. Maybe not right now, but I will need it, so it might as well be now.
Sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mosquitto-dev/mosquitto-ppa gives me a “Colud not find a distribution template for Raspbian/stretch.” Ok, so I go to Github/mqtt. Seems to indicate there that I should be downloading from http://mosquitto.org/download. And so I get mosquitto-1.5.1. When I run the make, the error is “fatal error: openssl/ssl.h: No such File or Directory.”
HELP 2 : How can I get Mosquitto onto the Openhab/RaspberryPi?
HELP 3 : Even with Mosquitto Broker running on the OpenHab/Pi, I still need a client on the Arduino end. Given that the script I already have loaded is limited, any suggestions for something that is “2 way” and has Mqtt??
Sorry this is so long winded. Guess I wanted to show that I just don’t jump on forums asking for help, I do try first, but the frustration does have a limit!
TIA, Wambat