There already is a lengthy " What You Need to Know Before You Start" section on the very first page of the docs. If you’ve any suggestions of anything further to add I’m sure we are open to discussion and a PR. Arguments could be made that it might not be strong enough but it does make clear:
- you will have to learn
- you have to be flexible
- it’s going to take a lot of time
- you have to read the docs
In my mind it seems to be a pretty good description of what a new user is getting into when starting OH. It’s just that they don’t read the docs in the first place. And that’s part of the problem.
When they don’t read the docs or search the forum, they are essentially wasting the volunteers on this forum’s time. If they will abandon OH because someone tells them they need to read the docs, they are probably not the type of user who will be successful with openHAB in the first place. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again here. Home automation is hard. You have to be able and willing to read the docs, experiment, look at examples and figure out how they work, and more in order to be remotely successful. While I see this getting better and better over time (I’m down right excited over the NGRE) it’s never going to be as easy as a few clicks and suddenly you have a working home automation system. Consequently I don’t see it ever becoming a “main stream” system. It is always going to take more learning and more work than any but those who are willing to dedicate some time to it will be successful.
Sometimes Markus’ posts come across as terse and in some respects rude. But I have no doubt that it is unintentional and he means no ill will towards anyone. He is also one of the main helpers on the forum and is one of the main maintainers of openHABian. He’s a productive and supportive member of the openHAB community. I want to make it clear how much I at least appreciate his contributions to OH which, frankly, exceed my own.
That being said, everyone who helps people on this forum are self selected volunteers. There is no test that someone has to pass. There is no vetting process or election. As such, unless you see a user with the “Maintainer” flag next to their icon, none of us speaks for openHAB. And even for the maintainers, they only speak for the part of openHAB that they are maintainers for. Some maintainers are heavily involved with the core but don’t know much about the UIs. Others are strictly binding developers. Most of the people you see helping users on this forum are users just like you or the OP and speak with no more authority over OH and it’s future directions than anyone else.
Said another way, if I’ve any authority at all, its a consequence of my experience and reputation. It wasn’t granted by the maintainers nor bestowed upon me from some leadership. The same goes for Markus, Vincent, Scott, Bruce, rossko57, and all the rest of the regulars (if I left you out I mean nothing by it, this is not intended to be a full list) who dive in and help their fellow users where they are able.
Nothing that Markus has ever posted, to my knowledge, has ever violated the terms of this forum. He is free to respond to and help users any way he wants within those terms. What would you have us do? Ban one of our most productive members? I don’t think so.
It can be even worse than garbage as these never get updated. There are still tutorials that pop-up pretty high in the Google results for OH 1.7.
Which ones? Out of the 300+ different bindings, which ones are “very simple” and informative and relatively universal? A step-by-step to achieve what? Everyone’s home automation is bespoke. What would be a good universal tutorial that would work for everyone?
If someone where to write a tutorial that used KNX switches, LD382A bulbs, and a Zigbee thermostat would that be helpful to you? It wouldn’t be to me, I don’t use any of those.
The reason this doesn’t exist is because there isn’t one tutorial that would do the job. We would need almost one tutorial for each and every one of the 300+ bindings, perhaps more if you need to have one for every device a given binding supports. So how do you deal with the commonalities among those 300+ tutorials? You make a generic here’s how to write rules, here’s how to create a sitemap, etc. Eventually you end up with pretty much exactly what we now have in the docs.
This has been brought up many many many times on the forum. It’s simply not feasible and all attempts to do so have failed. Even simpler projects like Zoneminder that only has to list all the cameras can’t keep up and has (as far as I can tell) abandoned trying to maintain a list of cameras that are supported. There is an ever growing list of supported devices which already runs in the tens of thousands I would guess. It’s a huge effort that, once started, will never be done and honestly it has very little value compared to the effort involved to create and maintain it. How would you know whether Wyze cameras are supported? Look for a Wyze binding. If there is no binding, there is probably no support. But if you are not sure, you need to dive into the technology of the device a little (e.g. what is the format of the video streams) and see if there is a more generic binding that supports it. As I said in my “There is no step-by-step tutorial” linked to above, you have to know and understand at least the basics of the technology you are dealing with in order to be successful with it in openHAB or any other home automation system for that matter. You have to know how the devices work and there is nothing we can do to hide that from you.
But of course, just because I don’t think it’s worth doing doesn’t mean someone who disagrees can’t give it a try. There have been several false starts in the past. None have gone anywhere though.
As a general rule, anything that would warrant a sticky in the beginner’s section more properly belongs in the docs. And that is what we do. When there is a post with something we think all beginners should read, we migrate the content to the official docs (e.g. Type Conversions became Textual Rules | openHAB).
And for the most part, those types of postings belong in Tutorials and Solutions, not Beginner’s. Per the category description, the Beginner’s category is for:
Ask your questions of the first hour here. Please also read the “About the Beginnners category” article to find some helpful hints.
And the About the Beginner’s post has the list of stuff that new comers MUST read before anything else. You won’t be surprised to see it’s the Docs.
Mostly confusing because each of the 300+ bindings necessarily has it’s own requirements and approaches because each technology works differently. A Hue light bulb is necessarily going to have a very different discovery and integration process from a KNX light switch. There’s not a whole lot we can do about that and honestly, if you had been around during the old OH 1.x days, you would see how far we have come in making this as uniform and automated as possible.
What is not clear? We can help with this and perhaps update the docs. But, as is explained in the concepts section of the docs, you have Things which represent a device. Things have Channels which represent an individual sensor reading or control point on the device. You link those Channels to Items. You control the device by sending a command to the Item. You receive the sensor reading by looking at the state of the Item.
Persistence isn’t too hard of a topic to understand but it’s also not something that everyone requires. Get to it when you are ready or encounter a situation where you need to preserve stuff over openHAB restarts or want to create charts. It is indeed an advanced topic you can save for later.
Presence detection is one of those things that newcomers always think should be simple but it is in fact one of the more challenging things to achieve. You will find dozens of posts and tutorials on the forum talking about it. This too is an advanced topic for a reason, it’s hard to achieve.