I’m new to openHab and been playing with it for a month now.
I’m running openHab 3 on raspberry pi 3+ with openhabian, and configuring everything through paper UI.
I’m having trouble understanding how items group work, and how group metadata for Alexa should be added.
So, first thing first: Creating an Item Group.
I built up my home locations in the model tab. I have a wiz color Light (but could be any other thing) and under “Room” I created an Equipment called “Light”. I linked the Items Power, Brightness, Color and ColorTemperature to the Equipment “Light” thus having a group called “Light” with all these items.
Is this the correct procedure?
Then, I want to add Alexa metadata to the whole group, so that I can change color by saying “Light color”.
If I add the metadata to the “Color”, “Power”, “ColorTemperature” and “Brightness” items, Alexa takes them all as independent devices, without them being associated to the name “Light”.
If I add the metadata to the “Light” group specifying “multiple”, it won’t work correctly.
What am I doing wrong?
For what I’ve read, I may need to add code manually to the items definition. All doc I’ve read shows some lines, but I’m not completely sure in which file / code tab in UI should I add it.
Just to be clear, PaperUI does not exist in OH 3. It has been replaced with MainUI. Unfortunately it’s important to get the terminology correct because it becomes hard for us to help when it’s wrong.
So far it sounds reasonable though you should use more unique and meaningful names.
An alternative is to use “Create Equipment from Thing” which will create the Equipment Group and the Items and make the Item members of that Equipment Group all in one step.
Also, there really is no need to create separate Switch, Dimmer, and Color Items. You can send ON/OFF commands or Dimmer type commands to a Color Item and it will work just fine. So all you really need is the Color and the ColorTemperature Items.
Nothing. Alexa doesn’t know anything about the semantic model. All it knows are the individual Items. Since a Color Item can be used as a Switch or a Dimmer too, just put the Alexa tag on the Color Item. Remove the Switch and Dimmer Items.
Alexa is going to use the label for that Color Item to identify it so that’s what you’d need to use to control it through Alexa.
No, you can do everything you need to through MainUI. But if there is something you do need to specify manually, when you open the Alexa metadata on the Item there is a “Code” tab in the upper right. That is where you would enter something manually that is not supported by the UI.
