I’m completely new to OpenHAB, and I have very little experience with Linux command line.
Recently I bought a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and installed OpenHAB 2.
So far I have managed to install different bindings and all things that were discovered.
Everything I have done was with the Paper UI.
Now I’m trying to find out how to create items from the things I have imported in OpenHAB.
Furthermore I read about sitemaps… are these necessary? Or is it a “just” nice extra to create easy to use overviews to manage every smart device? If really needed, I would like to know how I need to create these sitemaps.
I already found some information in the documentation area, but almost everything I see is command line driven and not with Paper UI… is the command line the only way to create items and sitemaps?
Please let me know… I’m quite enthusiastic about the possibilities of OpenHAB, but right now I feel I’m stuck and I don’t get any further.
If you are referring to textual configuration, yes that’s the only way to create sitemaps! For items you can use Paper UI to create items even automatically after the discovery of things using simple mode for item linking.
I found the simple mode… thanks for that
However, I cannot see items after that
How can I create rules to work with items?
Also only in text files?
It’s quite unclear to me how I can address all kinds of actions to the smart devices I have…
Seeing the text files, I need to have some programming knowledge it seems?
Or is there some kind of GUI editor that you can use to create rules and actions and stuff?
For the DSL based rules, yes you need a minimum understanding of OOP languages!
The only GUI interface for rules right now “out of the box” is the Experimental Rule Engine (you can install it using the addons section and selecting the Misc tab, there you will find the Experimental Rule Engine, install it and you should see Rules - ERE in the left drawer)!
In simple mode, an Item is created for all your Thing’s Channels. The Item will have the same name as the Channel with the : replaced with _. So if you have a channel named zwave:device:dongle:node3:switch_binary in Simple mode you will have an Item named zwave_device_dongle_node3_switch_binary created and linked to it automatically.
For now I recommend that yes, you stick to only .rules files. The ERE george mentions is not yet ready for general use primarily because of lack of documentation. I’m trying to address that but it will take some weeks.
Eventually and hopefully sometime soon, there will be a way to run your Rules DSL Rules on the ERE so any work you do now on .rules files will not be lost work.
