I'm at a crossroads

You summed up HA vs OH pretty well imho.
HA is extremely good at how easy it is to add things and build nice pages.

OH is way mir robust on the Modeling and automation part. The additional layer of things and items makes you much more flexible. In HA a light is a light. In OH you have things with channels and items that you can freely combine.

Complex scripts and rules in HA can be a pain. On the other hand, building awesome looking home screens is quite a bit easier with HAs system.

As for Brother lase printer - which model do you have? I found that lots of them are fairly easy to integrate with without dedicated binding, only by using SNMP binding itself.

I have a mixture of Hikvision and cheaper TPLink cameras. The Hikvisions are great within Openhab if you use the line crossing detection trigger for rules. I run the TPLink cameras through Motion on the same raspberry PI to trigger motion alerts and to convert the stream to display on the same web page of all my cameras.

I don’t think I’ll ever change from using classic sitemaps and coding rules just for the flexibility it gives you. I very rarely use the controls most of my interaction with OpenHab I try to automate or use Siri via the Homekit integration. I did try to adopt the OH3 UI but the classic sitemaps just feel much more solid.

If you have HA and OH running, you’re almost there. Use MQTT to communicate between the systems. HA has a feature called MQTT Statestream. Use that and a few (simple) automations on the HA side and you are up and running.

I run both for this exact reason. I treat HA as an additional “binding” that lets me integrate devices OH cannot.

1 Like

If you know, what’s “under the hood” and keep track of changes and “I did this with software/framework X”, it should be no problem using HA, OH and let’s bring it others as well.

The biggest “no-go” (at least in my opinion) is to use devices, that rely on proprietery hardware or cloud access only. These can be integrated in pretty much all environments, but either lack privacy or are at risk of discontinued - or both.

In my current use case of integrating my newly acquired Fiat 500e: there’s no “standalone” script available (e.g. there’s bluelinky for Hyundai/Kia and scripts for VW, Tesla, …), I’m currently on my way to use the HA-integration with UConnect (Stellantis cars) and just send out the values via MQTT and receive commands via MQTT also.
for me it’s only another way of “integrating” my smarthome data and commands. No big difference between integrating a Python/PHP/… script vs. using Home Assistang or another “software”…

tl:>dr;
I pretty much let all my smarthome data/commands/… run over MQTT. So I’m pretty much independent on how to utilize these. In theory I could also remove OH as my central smarthome hub with any given framework/software - as long as all integrations run over MQTT as it is right now.

hehe - I wrote a whole bunch of paragraphs, but you summed it up in one sentence! :wink:

2 Likes

I have a MFC-7860DW. I’ll try the SNMP binding tonight. Thanks.

Some hints on snmp thing:

It may be disabled o default. Try to look settings in web configuration panel of the printer.

You may need a snmp browser, like snmp walker or sthng to browse all resources exposed by the printer. I bet it will be more than couple hundred endpoints :wink:

Yeah, I’ve tried the smart plugs with great success, but the tuya bulbs…nothing. I didn’t know Tuya pulled support. Interesting… In the past I’ve flashed Tasmota with great sucess, but the new Tuya stuff isn’t Tasmota compatible that I know of.

I have an old chinese piece of garbage which works in HA and my android Onvier app, but haven’t had ANY luck in OH. I am currently looking at the Reolink doorbell stuff as well as their NVR. Not sure if its in HA yet either.

Some things it’s not possible. For example, my electric company uses the EAGLE 200 to interface with, but OH doesn’t talk to it, AFAIK. Yes I could go completely custom, but… I also have a family, coaching, and work to take my time… As we all do! :grinning:

1 Like

THAT is interesting! I will check this out closer. I believe it is for reading the state from HA only, but mostly that is what I am looking for. Then I can run rules in OH from data received from HA.

It’s more that they never supported Tasmota in the first place. Newer devices have firmware that prevents OTA flashing or use Realtek chips that aren’t compatible with Tasmota.

Note that Tuya doesn’t sell directly to consumers–they’re purely a business-to-business company. If they have any concerns about Tasmota, I would guess it’s because their customers (the third-party companies who rebrand Tuya devices) complained about it. That would impact Tuya far more than folks like us flashing Tasmota. I’d be surprised if we make up even 1% of the global Tuya market.

Mine too (BC Hydro in Canada), but I live in a condominium so I can’t even get one. :wink:

Woohoo! I’m in Port Cquitlam, BC, just outside of Vancouver

It’s easier than that. For example, a switch Item can be linked to a MQTT topic thing that subscribes to the state topic from HA. You may have to map payloads (off=OFF, or some variation), but it works flawlessly. The rules come on the HA side, as you will need to use the payload from OH to change entities in HA.

I suspected that’d be the case, since the Eagle 200 is made by a local company. I’m in Victoria.

The Eagle is happier sending data than being polled in my experience. I set up a simple nodejs script and have it accept data from the Eagle and push that into OH. It’s worked well for me for years. I’ve never had an issue with it.

2 Likes

I did a look at your posts on the forum and found none regarding your camera issues. You’re welcome to post or PM some TRACE level logs for the camera and I can take a look. I often do this and have a fixed jar in a matter of days for people to use. I recently found and fixed some bugs in the ONVIF code of the binding, so please upgrade to openHAB 3.4 Stable (released today) to get these changes as they may have stopped some ONVIF cameras from working in older builds.

Regarding reolink, I am adding support for them at the moment, see here:
Adding Reolink API to the IpCamera Binding, Alpha and Beta testers needed - Add-ons / Bindings - openHAB Community

Yes, they do work in Home Assistant but through HACS integrations and there are at least 2-3 of them to choose which one works in your use case and risk they change to a new integration that means you need to migrate across. I believe 1 HAC is if the camera is stand alone, and another if you then buy and add a NVR, you need to migrate and do setup again for a different HAC.
Compare this to openHAB, where I am working towards having all cameras that work locally in the same binding, that means the channels are all standardized making life easier if you move from 1 brand of camera to another. This is also for widget reasons so a widget created for 1 camera brand can be used across multiple brands. If you change to using a NVR, you change one setting in the binding and the binding changes everything needed in the background for you.

Yes I do agree that OH has spent a lot of time making life consistent, stable, robust and that is what I like. OH has looked at the framework in depth to make less breaking changes down the road and this can slow development down. HA seems to just make changes as fast as possible and not care about the strain the changes down the road cause on users. Each has its pros and cons and this is not a dig at the two different styles.

3 Likes

Yeah, I haven’t delved too much into this camera. I was using it mostly an example. I will be upgrading asap and go from there

Agreed. I was a bit surprised at HA when I took a look at it. It really smacked me of adding features, then adding other “features” to compensate for the lack of forethought in its design. I might be wrong though as I really just took a curious look.

This topic was automatically closed 41 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.