I am very new to the entire home automation. I have a raspberry pi that I have followed tutorials and installed openhab. I have figured out how to login to it via my smartphone and view the demo sitemap. Now I am looking at making my own site map to include fan controls, temp/humidity readings, switch controls, and more. I would like to control the fans based on temperature, and or the push of a button on my phone. I am buying a 8 channel relay board to pair with my pi using the gpio ports. I have no clue where to begin. I haven’t purchased any z wave wall switches as of yet, but that is the plan. What I would like to know is how to get the addon for gpio, and then how to begin constructing my sitemap. I have 4 Adafruit HTU21D-F temp/humidity sensors coming to connect via GPIO, that is another thing I will have to figure out how to wire and get the PI to read them. I ordered a Gertbot as well, I don’t know as it will be of any use for this project. If anyone has any advice or examples, please help!! Thank you.
My advice is to start much much smaller. Take on home automation is small steps.
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Play around with modifications to the demo sitemap, Items, and rules and see how things change and how they interact. Read the wiki.
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Create a new sitemap and some Items and Rules from scratch. Don’t worry about making them actually do something just yet. Again you are trying to get a feel for how the various parts of OH work together.
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Now start to play with bindings. Good bindings to start with include the Weather Binding, Astro Binding, and Network Health bindings as they don’t require anything else besides networking to work. And you will very likely want to use them in your final setup as well.
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By this point you will have a decent understanding of how OH works and how to get around inside it. Now start learning the GPIO and relays and such. Start with one device like a light to control and get it to work. It might be easier to learn how that works by coding things up in Python with the RPi.GPIO library first to get a feel for how GPIO works. Then try it with the GPIO binding within openHAB.
If you try to learn all of this stuff all at the same time you will likely run into problems. This stuff is hard and these DIY systems (i.e. GPIO and arduino based systems) are even more difficult.
Also, as you learn you may refine your requirements as you discover what is and is not possible or easy in the various parts of the system.
Thank you rlkoshak, I really appretiate the advice. Small steps are always good!
I would also strongly suggest that you use Openhab Designer when creating items, sitemaps and rules. So many people spend time trying to spot syntax errors that designer can fix instantly.
This may involve a bit of time setting up Samba, to run designer on a separate computer, but it is well worth the investment.