How well can the OH2 designer?
If I have to house all air-conditional, smart tv, all in different brands into a single app (controller)?
Does the OH2 is only cater for simple task like on/off? To me more specific, if I have a Samsung air-conditional with “smart ion” mode, how can we build a one for all, all for one app to control all the gadgets?
Or can I say, every deployment will have to tailor make a controller app?
I’m going to go with English isn’t your primary language, so I’m going to try and keep it simple.
OH(and it doesn’t matter if it’s OH1.8 or OH2) use the same method to create the GUI(or app as you call it). The sitemaps in OH are what is used to make it “show” things to do. So if you add things in the sitemap, and open the app on either your phone, or a web browser, it’s going to look exactly the same.
If you want some fancy custom GUI, you’re going to need to create it, which isn’t all that hard to do with a REST interface.
Yeah, thanks for the reply. U are right, English is not my main language.
Sorry for the confusion. I am not planning to create custom layout. But more on “is there such thing in sitemap?”
I know openhab can configure on/off, slider, color picker.
Here are the questions
Depends on what bindings you’re using for TV control and A/C control. You can certainly do it, but it may not be pretty. I use a Harmony for controlling my TV, and have a “Selection” group in my sitemap for my favorite channels. We don’t usually use it through the GUI, it’s more for Alexa(Echo) to allow us to change the TV channel by voice.
As far as your A/C, depends again on the binding. If you’re using a thermostat it would depend on that thermostat and if it supports turning on/off this Ion mode.
Some general comments:
What features can and cannot be controlled depends on the Binding you use to control it. For example, one can do pretty much anything to a Nest that you can do on the device itself while the ZCOMBO Smoke/CO Alarm only reports whether the alarm went off.
openHAB supports rules. Rules are blocks of code that execute in response to events. Pretty much anything you can think of can be programmed in rules. So if you want to turn on your furnace when the weather says there is snow, you can write a rule for that. You want to dim the lights when you turn on the TV, you can write a rule for that.
Home Automation works best when you try to make it work with any user interface at all. If you have to resort to using an app on your phone or a web page, it isn’t home automation, it is home control. You should strive for automation so the house just does stuff without needing to manually trigger it.
Thanks for the fruitful replies.
My intention is to create a solution to remote control all tvs, AC, media player, fans. Regardless you call it smart home or smart control. it’s also intention to reduce usage of batteries.
But my concern is, since it’s very depending on different branded devices, my worry is one day all those code are proprietary and my solution will be totally useless.
Please let me know if my approach is feasible?
Thanks
In general your approach is feasible. However, as I’ve said, it completely depends on the make and model of your specific devices. What can be controlled and how it is controlled is 100% dependent on the specific device.
I’ve been thinking about similar features as OP mentioned. Wondering if anybody has any input.
I have OH working very well for a lot of features, but I still am forced to go to separate Harmony Hub and Kodi Remote apps for most of the control for these devices. I have OH setup to turn these on/off and switch between different harmony activities for example, but am still forced to go to the separate apps to punch in channels, or arrow around, or press select. I would love to get away from that and just use OH.
Sure seems the functionality is there, it’s just the UI that has me stumped. I suppose I could put a button that says “1”, for example, or a button that says “Up arrow” and get the functions I need. But I sure would like a better UI for this. Something a little more “remote-like”.
I’ve found things like this: http://keith-wood.name/keypad.html
But am really out of my wheelhouse with javascript and can’t believe I’m the only one who has ran into this.
Anybody have any thoughts??? Thanks for the help. Really loving OH btw!
You are not the only one who has experienced this. But the sitemap UI, particularly for OH 1, is the least mature and least capable of all the OH subcomponents. It really is not designed for providing a nice looking multi-row or multiple items per row user interface.
You can fake it a little using a Number Item to represent a row of buttons and mappings to map each of those buttons to a number and then a rule triggered by those row Items that gets the number and performs the appropriate action (e.g. sending the command for channel up). It is clunky but it will work.
You can use a webview that implements the UI and issues the REST API commands back to OH corresponding to the button presses, though I’ve had limited success accessing webviews from my phone when I’m away from my home network so YMMV.
You can switch over to use a completely different 3rd party UI and interact with OH through MQTT or the REST API and abandon the native OH UI.
Hey, thanks for this. Does OH2 have some better tools to handle this? I’ve been holding off looking at OH2 as I read recently the Insteon PLM isn’t work at the moment.
I may explore the webview a little more. I previously had all sorts of trouble with webview not showing up in certain circumstances. The fix: I ditched my OnHub router that didnt support NAT loopback (using as access point only now, it really shines here), and installed a PFSense router and setup proper NAT settings. I can now use my WAN address from both outside and inside my home network with great results. With PFSense using the WAN address internally, it is smart enough to keep the traffic local, so it’s nice and fast. Jsut had to use my WAN address in the webview URL’s. FYI!
No clue. I’ve not moved to OH 2 yet either. I’m slowly trying to refactor my entire setup using Docker and some auto-build scripts and the like which I want to get done first before I move to OH 2. Plus I need to get the OH 2 documentation framework set up before I take on any other large projects.
not to pipe in late, but what about using a wifi to ir bridge? can send any command via an ir blaster to the devices.