Hi - I spent about 4h with the new MainUI today with hopes of leaving SiteMaps and HABPanel behind, and I’m looking for some hints on how to accomplish something.
I mostly use a UI for troubleshooting and script development so looks are not important but surfacing the right data is.
I have a fleet of devices running Tasmota that I would like to organize into a navigable tree.
They have Items based on three bindings
MQTT (for telemetry and commands)
Network Binding (for uptime and latency calculations)
Unifi Binding (for additional connectivity and access point info to ensure they associate correctly).
Items are in text configs right now so I can edit them easily before importing, if I need to.
I’d like to be able to click a button on the home page and see a list of endpoints running tasmota or properties of the devices running tasmota. I have access to all attributes of things mentioned below.
From the list of endpoints, if I click one, I see all linked items (ip_address, uptime, sensors, access point, etc.)
From the list of attributes, I can select properties such as SW Version, RSSI, Latency, Uptime, etc.
What is a good approach to organize/tag/classify these items to facilitate building out these pages (and what is a good approach for the pages)? Spent some time reading but still not 100% sure…especially as it seems harder to bulk-modify the items after importing them…
You need to build the model. Then the everything that is properly semantically tagged will be represented automatically on the Locations, Equipment, and Properties tab of the Overview Page.
Thanks @rlkoshak - I’m still trying to wrap my head around this, and the best way to move all of my items from text configs into this database.
Is Equipment just a group that has a parent location? If that is the case, should I just build out equipment groups in my text configs and then use the import tool? It seems like it will take forever to do in the UI.
A Location is a Group with one of the supported Location tags applied (e.g. Garage).
An Equipment is a Group or an Item with one of the supported Equipment tags applied (e.g. HVAC).
A Point is an Item with at least one of the Point tags applied and an optional Property tag applied (e.g. Measurement, Temperature).
Theses can be placed in a location by making it a member of the location tagged Group. Equipment can be a single Item, or a Group containing one or more Point Items and Equipment Items/Groups (i.e. you can model equipment as a collection of equipment).
I started doing it by importing them and then modifying the memberships. I’ve since abandoned importing my old Items at all. Instead I use “Create Equipment from Thing” on the Model page to recreate my Items. I find that to be faster than even trying to modify my .items files to fit the model, and I actually had a model defined in my OH 2.5 .items files.
I had a similar constellation with many tasmota-devices, and the challenge how to monitor and configure them with OpenHAB.
Then I discovered TasmoAdmin and removed all tasmota-maintenance stuff out of OpenHAB.
Maybe this can help to reduce the needed Tasmota-Items in your installation, too.
Sure, you can do all of this stuff inside of OpenHAB, but you have to setup this by yourself.
Maybe somewhere in the future, this can be handled in a Tasmota-Binding, but right now that is far away.
Thanks for the tips! I’m in on the new UI and model!
My tasmota devices were pretty well organized, and had a consistent naming convention with Unifi and Network Binding items so I was able to import them with a few hours of effort.
I’ve tinkered with TDM but couldn’t get it going with Docker, and gave up…will look to join binding beta-tester group.
I can easily see where some equipment should be recreated through MainUI instead of trying to clean up config files.
one question about the automatically generated locations / equipment / properties.
I like the locations look a lot and would like to just copy these to the overview.
However, editing the overview does not allow to place a complete location.
Is there a way to copy and paste the locations to the standard overview loaded first when opening my_openhab_IP_adress:8080?
No. you’d have to define that all yourself and once added to the custom overview page it will be fixed.
Since they are already in the Location’s tab, why would you want to copy them? If all you want is the Locations tab you can hide the Overview, Equipment, and Properties tabs I think.
Yes, it looks like you can hide Locations, Equipment, and Properties but not Overview. So you’ll have to create the widgets yourself. You can create the widgets on the location Group Item as the custom “default standalone widget” and then add the location to the overview page from the model.
