Hi All,
I’ve been running openHAB Ver 2 on a RPi3 for quite a few years now and it has fulfilled my requirements.
I now have more time on my hands and wish to upgrade to Ver 4.
My current system has approximately 120 items/groups defined in text item files and probably 80 or so created via the paperui.
Obviously my rules are also in rules text files.
All of my user interfaces are using sitemap text files. Qty ~ 20.
My bindings/hardware interfaces are:
Astro
MQTT
Network
NTP
OpenWeather
Samsung TV
Sensibo
Sonos
Systeminfo
Zwave
Zigbee
What are you thoughts on moving all of these things over to Ver4 on a RPi4?
What user interface should I use/develop in?
There are a lot of similar questions to this, so I’d suggest doing a search to find out how others have gone about it (including upgrading to OH3).
The fastest solution is to make a backup of your SD card, then do an in-place upgrade. Admittedly, I have no idea how well that will work, because so much has changed. Your text files will still be there, but there are going to be breaking changes from the past few years. You’ll spend most of your time trying to figure out why things that used to work are broken, and we won’t be of much help…because it’s been a long time since most of us transitioned from OH2.
I don’t recommend the fastest solution. Not just because it’ll be frustrating, but because it leaves you stuck in OH2 ways of doing things. Instead, I think you’re better off treating OH4 like a completely new system that you have to learn from the ground up, and that happens to share some similarities with the system you’re leaving behind. This means reading the docs like everything is brand new.
If you have a spare RPi, set up OH4 on it and then you can run both systems side by side, adding to OH4 as you remove from OH2. You could move over your text files and fix the breaking changes in them, but I personally recommend trying to use the UI as much as possible: things, items, rules, pages, even sitemaps. If you do that, you’ll gain a greater understanding of what OH4 can do, particularly with the semantic model.
You might find later that you prefer text files, but at least you know how the UI works and what it offers.
Admittedly, I took the fast route when I moved to OH3. I had every intention of moving fully into the UI and building a semantic model, but I’ve never found time for it. That’s what happens when you have something that works well enough–it never becomes a priority. So I’m not moving to OH4 until I have the time to do it properly and abandon my OH2/3 thinking.
the only two things I can add to @rpwong’s excellent answer is:
1.x bindings were dropped in OH 3. If you aren’t using Things, configuring and using the 3.0/4.0 equivalents bindings will be radically different
I cannot stress this enough, do not skip the getting started tutorial. Those how have the most trouble are OH 2.x users who skip getting started.
OH 4 is more just refinements on OH 3 thinking. If you are good with OH 3, OH 4 is just going to add new features. There are not nearly as many totally new concepts or ways to do things as there was in OH 3.
Fair enough. Are there any hidden videos on openHAB Ver3/4 that I’m not finding on YouTube? E.g. some other streaming service?
The only reasonable videos I can find are in Spanish and hard to follow, even with the subtitles.
Yeah, it’s more about wanting to intentionally shift my perspective. I basically ignored the semantic model and pages in OH3, and I don’t want to do that any more.
