Major Frustration with Vera Integration

[TheKorn]

@shorin

Made a new one with your info and all was good.

Rock on!

@shorin

Yeah, I get that feeling about most of the configuration. One errant character will break everything without any logs, etc…

Well, yes and no; it’s kind of like programming in that it depends on exactly where and what the problem is, what will break…

…but at the same time you seem to be unaware of the Openhab Designer. I really can’t recommend the designer highly enough for OH1 installs, especially for newbies! It does syntax and logic checking for you, so it’ll catch all your problems like this (including the problem where you had names mismatched between items and sitemaps!) and flag them so you can fix them. Like Mark I do a hell of a lot of text editing in vi, so I naturally wanted to use that as my editor. I really didn’t know how much of a disservice I was doing to myself until I got completely frustrated one day and tried the designer. It’s basically a trained set of eyes looking at your code while you’re writing it, checking syntax and objects. So while very (very!) occasionally it’ll flag something that shouldn’t be flagged, it’s good enough that if the designer throws a flag I safely assume I’ve screwed something up. So I’d strongly recommend checking it out! It cuts out 95% of the chasing phatoms type problems.

(That’s part of what doesn’t help imperihab… the designer has no idea about imperihab’s format, so it can’t do any checking for it. It’ll check to make sure things you put into imperihab don’t break other stuff, but things that break imperihab internally it can’t check.)

(Being fair, designer would not have caught your map file problem unless you opened the map file in the designer. But then the problem would have jumped out at you anyway, so… yeah.)

@shorin

I figured my issues was with the sitemap, etc. and it was good all along. A note for future people with issues starting up - the sitemap isn’t dynamic. It has to be refreshed to see a state change on a door sensor for instance. I’m hoping this is something changing for OH2 as refreshing the page is annoying and not intuitive in today’s world.

Actually that is a bug that was introduced between 1.8.1 and 1.8.2; it’s the reason why I haven’t upgraded to 1.8.2. Not really sure why a 1.8.3 wasn’t pushed out to correct it.

[guessed (Mark Clark)]

@shorin

I agree, and that’s what I tried to do. My problems really come down to three things:

1. When I ran the miosTransform.sh, I used the argument for the file I was “pointing it to” instead of the name I wanted it to give. And then renamed it to “house” afterwards. This made all the pointers inside the file to "mios=“unit:user_data.xml…” instead of "mios=“unit:house…”

2. The above was pointing to “house” as the unit name (once fixed). In the openhab.cfg, I had the name listed as “home”. I.E. mios:home.host = 192.168.xx.xxx

3. Didn’t have the transform files and when I did it was corrupted.

I modified the MiOS Item Generator as well. It now provides more diag information as the conversions are taking place.

When you run miosTransform.sh (no parameters) it now provides an example:

mark$ ./miosTransform.sh 
Usage:   ./miosTransform.sh <openHAB-MiOSUnitName>
Example: ./miosTransform.sh house

and if you run it with a parameter, it provides guidance on keeping the settings aligned:

mark$ ./miosTransform.sh home
INFO: Transforming MiOS Unit Metadata from user_data.xml...
INFO: Metadata Transformed into openHAB Item file home.items!
INFO: Processing for any Duplicate Item names
INFO: Your generated openHAB Item file (home.items) is good to go!
INFO: Remember to configure your MiOS Unit Name ('home') openhab.cfg (openHAB 1.x), or mios.cfg (openHAB 2.x)

Not a huge investment, but given the focus is on OH2, this should help reduce some issues with the OH1.x conversions.

@shorin

I would think it would be trivial for someone with the right knowledge to write a script to do the same thing for 1.X. Maybe just a miosInstall.sh or something that downloads everything needed, puts it in the correct folders, and also initiates the scripts you’ve already written to get the data from the Vera and generate an items file from them.

Most Developer focus is now on getting either OH 1.x Bindings running correctly under OH 2.x (compat mode), or on writing them natively to OH 2.x. This already provides the functionality you’re describing above, so it’s likely not going to get a lot of retrofit to OH 1.x setups

Like I’ve said before - “idiot proof”. I’ve written a lot of technical documentation over the years, and when I started, I was given a really good piece of advise - never assume they have any base experience. You should assume they’ve never even seen this thing before. It makes it much more tedious to write the documentation, but it makes it work for anyone.

The Wiki pages are open for anyone to write to via the github UI. If you’ve got specific tweaks in mind, feel free to add stuff directly to the page(s).

The whole section on logging enablement was added by a user, along with the pre-amble menu/links (and probably a ton of other stuff I’ve missed)

Anyhow, congrats on your journey into openHAB!! Hopefully the next steps will be easer (esp if you use the Designer for code work). If you come across additional questions, feel free to post…

[shorin (Danny)]

@TheKorn

…but at the same time you seem to be unaware of the Openhab Designer. I really can’t recommend the designer highly enough for OH1 installs, especially for newbies!

I thought designer was just for OH2. I’ll definitely have to take a look.

@guessed

I modified the MiOS Item Generator as well. It now provides more diag information as the conversions are taking place.

That should definitely help people from making the same mistake I did.

@guessed

The Wiki pages are open for anyone to write to via the github UI. If you’ve got specific tweaks in mind, feel free to add stuff directly to the page(s).

I may do that…

@guessed

Anyhow, congrats on your journey into openHAB!! Hopefully the next steps will be easer (esp if you use the Designer for code work). If you come across additional questions, feel free to post…

Thanks. I really appreciate all the help in getting this figured out. Yeah, I’m sure I’ll have more questions as time goes on.