OH2, RFXCom - consistent and stable behaviour?

Add-ons Bindings
1

Hi there,

I’ve been trying in vain to migrate my OH1.8 setup to OH2 for sometime now - I’ve tried on and off and have spent in the order of around 100 hours, but have yet to succeed. The main stumbling block has been the RFXCOM binding - I use a number of Mood controllers around the house for lighting, so without it, it’s a deal breaker.

My attempts to run OH2 alongside OH1.8 are documented across a number of posts, so today I started from scratch with an openHabian install.

I managed to get the RFXCOM binding working with a couple of Dimmer modules through the Paper UI, and when I tried a number of mood controllers, they appeared in the inbox… all good

I then tried to configure the setup via text files, but couldn’t get it to work - the problem seemed to be the bridge configuration not wanting to work. It worked briefly then stopped. I made the change to add the symlink rules and it worked again momentarily before refusing to connect with Invalid port.

Having decided to abandon text based setup, I reconfigured everything via the PaperUI again, this time using the symlink /dev/USBrfxcom, however this gave the Connection to RFXCOM transceiver failed: invalid port error again, returning serial port to /dev/ttyUSB0 and sending commands to the dimmers works again.

However, when trying various mood controllers, these are no longer picked up and don’t appear in the paper UI.

So, the desire to migrate to OH2 is there, I’m seeing lots of new things in OH2 that I want to try, but am constrained by needing the RFXCOM transceiver to work.

[23:01:19] openhabian@openHABianPi:~$ ls -al /dev/*USB*
crw-rw-rw- 1 root dialout 188, 0 May  6 22:56 /dev/ttyUSB0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root         7 May  6 22:26 /dev/USBrfxcom -> ttyUSB0

.things (not currently used, but might help someone spot a glaring error):

Bridge rfxcom:bridge:usb0 [ serialPort="/dev/ttyUSB0" ] {
	Thing lighting5 Bedroom1_Left_Lamp_Dimmer  [deviceId="14732335.4", subType="LightwaveRF,Siemens"]
	Thing lighting5 Bedroom1_Right_Lamp_Dimmer  [deviceId="14732335.5", subType="LightwaveRF,Siemens"]
	Thing lighting5 Bedroom1_Lamp_Dimmer  [deviceId="14732335.6", subType="LightwaveRF,Siemens"]
	}

.items:

Dimmer Bed1_Right_Lamp "Right [%d %%]" ["Lighting"] { channel="rfxcom:lighting5:usb0:Bedroom1_Right_Lamp_Dimmer:dimmingLevel" }
Dimmer Bed1_Left_Lamp "Left [%d %%]" ["Lighting"] { channel="rfxcom:lighting5:usb0:Bedroom1_Left_Lamp_Dimmer:dimmingLevel" }

Thanks
James

2

Have you considered using the 1.9 version of the RFXCom binding in OH 2, to get you by for now until you can either figure out why the 2.0 binding isn’t working properly or it gets fixed?

Some things that come to mind in terms of troubleshooting:

  • are you sure your old OH 1.x isn’t running at the same time as OH 2? There could be contention for a lock on the devices
  • are you sure there isn’t something else running which might be getting a lock on those devices?
  • are there any other differences between your OH1.8 and 2.0 machines (assuming they are running on separate machines)? There could be a timing issue (I’m seeing this right now migrating from a bare metal deployment to a VM for accessing my zwave dongle.

I don’t use RFXCOM so won’t be any specific help.

3

Thanks Rich,

I’m swapping out SD cards for 1.8 and 2.0, wanting to keep them entirely separate to eliminate those issue you point out (and not having another pi3 to hand!).

I discovered that the functionality I need to support in the RFXCOM binding isn’t yet available (MOOD controllers), so have taken a different approach until then in that I’ll leave OH18 on the PI and migrate the scripts I can (and know I won’t need to touch) on my windows desktop; this I can dip in and out of and not have to worry about keeping a functioning system running!

I had previously tried the 1.9 binding on the pi3, and had similar issues -lack of reliability/consistency - it would cause openhab to crash among other oddities.

I didn’t think to try it on openhabian build I did at the weekend…I lost heart after many hours and switched my attention to other bindings - I’m keen to migrate over to 2.0 bindings where I can…food for thought if I get chance…

Thanks again
James