GE are good, but expensive, especially if you need to add slave switches to a circuit.
Hi, Sorry I have not been on since Friday. It’s been one of those weekends. I thank everyone for their response to my initial question. I did decide to give Sarah a try and following the instructions, I did download and install it on a Raspberry pi. Download took less than 10 minutes. I did not have any real investment in any setup at this point so I just formatted an SD card I had and used balenaEtcher to burn the image. I put it in the pi and powered it up. I clicked on the link in the instructions and the Sarah Command Center came up and I downloaded and installed the latest updates.
I have a starting point now and will start small as everyone has suggested. I have lots of reading to do based on the links and suggestions provided. I will let you all know how things go. Thanks again for all your understanding and help.
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I just hope whatever installation and configuration was done by Sarah does not hamper people here from helping when needed.
True, it was the second brand that provided me far better results then my attempt to use WeMo switches; as I don’t plan on moving for at least another decade I think I will get my return. Also discovered I had two classic switches that had cracked blocks on the live wires that broke apart when I replaced them…even when you buy a house new, you can still find cut corners.
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To put your mind at ease… no, it will not impact support. It is completely unaltered from a coding point of view. The only thing I do slightly differently is to run a short script to do the partition resize using raspi-config on first boot. Other than that, I have only configured it using standard methods like installing some bindings through PaperUI, etc. Even the mods I made to the Pi came from the openHAB site - these were mostly related to USB sound. But just to be certain, I will make sure I put clear instructions on my site to tell everyone to come to me first for help for anything Sarah related. Anything else will be business as usual for openHAB.
@rfrechet - Thanks, for trying it out. Just keep following the docs to include your Things and let me know if you have any problems.
Hi @rfrechet, How’s everything going? Did you get things up and running yet? Any problems? I’m always happy to help. Thanks
Hi @seeLive, Sorry, it took me so long to get back to you. I had some other home projects I’ve been focusing on. But, I did finally get it set up. Here are my thoughts:
I was able to get the image burned and my devices included within about an hour. And, like you noted on your site, I noticed that not everything was working right away. Some devices were not yet reporting any data like the battery and luminance levels. By the next day (I had done this later in the evening) everything was working and S.A.R.A.H. was turning lights on and off and talking. It was pretty neat. The internet radio was working well. There are some decent channels to listen to and it was all very configurable through the command center. Everything seemed to work as promised and I had to do very little to do to make it go. I was impressed with the simplicity.
I like the S.A.R.A.H. Command Center. It was very easy to change the various settings, setup email and weather and to change some of the text being spoken. I found your links to be very helpful. It’s also nice to be able to control the Raspberry Pi. For example, being able to restart the openHAB service, reboot, shutdown and pull updates. I can see how that would make it easy to manage.
The Home Wizard is cool. I liked the idea of using a template for the whole house. It made the set up very straight forward as far as associating the devices to each room and how it would function in that room. From what I understand it generates the rules and config files. Is that correct? Also, what does the ‘show channels’ button do? I saw it was populated with various text that seemed to relate to the USB Z-wave stick id, but wasn’t sure.
Overall, I liked the experience. I was up and running quickly and with not much effort. On the down side, I don’t really know what it all means yet. Since, I haven’t tried to setup openHAB by hand I don’t really know what the differences would be. From my limited experience so far, it seems like there are a lot of people on the forum trying to figure everything out and I’m guessing that’s what S.A.R.A.H. is trying to provide. But, I can say that I didn’t have to write any code or do much configuration and it all just works.
I look forward to adding more devices and seeing what else it can do.
Thanks, I would definitely recommend it to others.
Rich
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Hey Rich, Glad it went well. Yes, that is correct. Saving the template in the Home wizard generates and installs all the config files and rules. This currently includes the email, weather, items, sitemap & things config files and all the rules. Also, you can reload the template, make changes and save it again as needed. It is all saved in the database.
The ‘show channels’ button exposes the channel fields in the Home wizard allowing you to map the various device channel definitions to their corresponding items in the .items file. The channel definitions are those channels that show up after you include a device in the PaperUI - e.g. ‘sensor_binary’, ‘alarm_general’ or ‘battery-level’. It’s helpful when you want channel definitions to map to certain items or need to overide a Thing’s default configuration that is generated. It allows you to easily maintain parts of the .items files entries from the UI.
Thanks, again for your interest. Please keep in mind for any support issues going forward, use the http://rpi-ha.com site. Good luck!