What kind of “monster applications” are you planning with openHAB? I’m running a pi3 with about 1500 items & 150 devices. Works fine. A little delay when modifying stuff, but the daily use is without.
Wow…that’s a lot of things. I’ve got much less. Only about thirty things.
Things are lights (Hue), light switches, radiators, electric heaters, doorbells, motion sensors, thermostats, contact sensors.
Rules planned around turning lights on/off, heaters on/off and responding to contact sensors on doors and my postbox!
What sort of things do you have?
What sort of rules are you planning on building?
Similar as you: hue lights, radiators, motion detectors, doorbell, door/window contacts. Additionally some multimedia stuff like Harmony, Squeezebox and Kodi.
I use some general heating rules, lights by events or general macros to turn several devices on/off with a single switch.
With your number of devices i would suggest buying a pi3 and use openHABian. Buy something more powerful if you need it, you don’t need it now. It’s also much simpler than installing everything from scratch. Put the image on SD and off you go.
Will only a Debian based distro work with openhabian? I am thinking of trying Fedora, but perhaps that will give me more trouble in this regard?
I don’t have Squeezebox or Harmony but yes, do have four Kodi boxes and three Google Home minis.
I haven’t tried any media rules yet mind. I envisage alerts or sound from kodi box when a trigger happens and/or sound from Google Home minis, also initiated from a trigger.
I’ve so far got things in OPenHAB in a ‘test’ form on a Windows box but have just put Ubuntu onto a NUC and have now installed OpenHab on there. So, will now move over from Windows to the Ubuntu NUC.
I did try installing OpenHabian on the NUC and was able to configure OpenHabian as described in the installation guide but got ‘lost’ getting any further but also, I was not able to see whether it was working or not since none of UIs responded.
Guys some pepole are just windows guys 
myself included
i really tried doing all on linux, i failed , i can tell you that windows is great way to start
and i am stuck like since i started…
but i have a great system ruining, win10 + Openhab + HiveMQ + Node-red + Plex server
the PC is a litle over kill I5 8GB ram with SSD ,and i think this is much better than RPI(not for power usage)
i know linux is the way to go but as i said i failed but i was able to build a good system for my needs
so if you are not doing Unix, windows is not such a bad thing for me its working great
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Thanks for your response.
I’m still in the throes of migrating from SmartThings and need to get to grips with Rules before I start migrating my existing SmartThings automations, since most of my things are z-wave.
I think I’ll stick with getting OpenHab with Windows working well and then look to migrate that over to Ubuntu…not sure how involved that might get but hopefully I can re-use any rules. I guess I will have to do a lot of re-pairing of Things in the new OpenHab Ubuntu installation.
please look at node-red - openhab - integration
your rule learning experience will be fun and short
dont be scared from node red its great tool!
thanks for the suggestion. I’ll take a look at this.
Would you have a noob link at hand please?
Hands on
After you see hands on here is some Docs that i did not have… and i did almost all by conman sense
to install node-red
- Java JDK 1.8+
- Node-JS
- in node-js CMD install node-red
Unless you are using the exec binding or executeCommandLine, it are using unofficial addons, if you use the backup and restore scripts (i.e. run the backup on your one machine and copy that backup to the new machine and run restore) you won’t have to do anything. All of you Things and Items will be there and your rules will work unchanged.
Thank you for that.
Should keep me busy this coming weekend.
Thanks for helping.
That is useful, I didn’t imagine it would be that straightforward.
My z-wave controller is Aeon Aeotec z-wave USB stick.
Would that be transferred over too?
All of the nodes are stored on the controller. You will need to reconfigure the serial device Thing since Linux doesn’t use COM ports but /dev/tty* files. But everything else (except those things I already mentioned)) will transfer over without change.
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sure, yes node red is Fun!
and will give you allot of new options, that are maybe hard to do in OH
for example , i was not able to get notifications from OH , so i am using Node red with PushBullet
problem solved…
so actually you will have two systems, if you cant acchive it in one try the other ,
good for noobs like us
- myopenhab.org with the Cloud Connector
- mail action
- Notify My Android action
- Prowl action
- PushBullet action
- Pushover action
- Pushsafer action
- Telegram action
- XMPP action
There are lots of options for notifications that don’t require NodeRed or any other external system. I’m not against the user of NodeRed, but they impression that OH only had one way to do notifications and if it won’t work you have to look elsewhere is false.
But I will counter that “fun” is subjective. I personally find graphical programming environments to be slow and frustrating.
I’m in two minds with rules creation, using a UI will be quick and hopefully easier than ‘coding’ a rule but then that ease and flexibility is very dependent on the UI and sometimes can feel clumsy when compared to clean ‘coding’…may end with a mix of the two, like you say.
Thanks.
i agree with you , but as i said i am not a programmer
i have only one or two rules in .rules files and all copy paste from other pepole
in node red i have done things that i proud of
" graphical programming environments to be slow and frustrating."
but this i don’t agree i find it very fast!
I don’t mean to imply that they run slowly, though some do. I find that it is much much slower and frustrating to build code using a mouse than typing words. It is also somewhat more limiting in what you can do and how you can structure the approach to the problem.
It requires more time and effort up front to learn how to write in a text-based language, but once past that initial ramp up the person writing in the text-based language will be able to do more and do it more quickly than the person using the graphical programming environment.
Does that matter in the home automation context? Probably not that much. 80% of the rules most people will want to write are pretty simple.
But as soon as someone encounters a hard problem in their environment or bumps up to a limitation of the graphical language, they will either have to give up or switch to a text based language. I’ve seen this a bunch of times just on this one forum.
How does Node Red handle backup, restore, versioning, and the like for its rules?
all my items are of open hab so i dont need to back up anything not related to the flow
and flow is a simple json txt that node red converts into grapic (so just a simple text file will do)
i did not think of backup till now
thanks!