OH3: Should Equipments themselves act as switches for their main function?

Setup, Configuration and Use Migration
1

Hi all,
doing my migration from OH2.5 to OH3, I just stumble about another thing, where I would like to know, if there is a best practice.

I have some lights wich consist of a rather simple setup in the model.
They are set up like this (not all have a power measurement, just putting that in to show something with more than just one point :slight_smile: ):

<Name of light>     Equipment_Lightbulb
    "Switch"             Point_Control_Switch
    "Power"              Point_Measurement

Now I am in the process of setting up independent groups, which will be used to control multiple lights at once.

I see two ways of doing this:

  1. I can add the Point_Control_Switch of the individual Equipments to a group.
  2. I can edit Equipment(-group) to aggregate the switches and then add the Equipment(-group) itself to the groups.

I can’t really tell why, but 2. somehow feels better to me.
But it is a hell of a lot of clicking in the UI plus I think I would have to give up that concept as soon as I have an equipment, which has more than one switch and one of the switches should not be triggered as part of the main On/Off for that equipment.

So basically my question is: do you recommend to make Equipment(-groups) controllable in a way, that the represent the main functionality of the equipment they represent?

Cheers,
Bastian

PS: I find the description of the conceptual approach in the documentation would be more helpful, if it would include more of an explained best practive setup.
If something like that exists somewhere, please point me to it, as I could not find anything in that direction.

2

These should either not be a part of your model at all, or these should replace your existing Equipment Groups. No semantically tagged Item can be a direct member of more than one semantically tagged Group. In other words, your Switch Items can’t be a member of more than one Equipment.

And this makes sense when you realize that the model represents the physical layout of your home automation. A Point can’t physically be a part of more than one Equipment. A Point or an Equipment can’t physically be in two different Locations at the same time.

It is reasonable and encouraged to create a functional Group Item with a type and aggregation function. But almost always these functional Group will be outside of the model entirely. I think it is possible to semantically tag the functional Group with a Point/Property and you could then put that into a Location and it will work (an exception to the member of rule I just mentioned) so you could pretend that your functional Group is a wholly separate Point. But you can’t make it an Equipment.

3

Hm, I think I could not make my question clear with my post. I’ll try to be more concrete:

I have this equipment:

"LivingRoomCeilingLight"                     Equipment_Lightbulb
    "LivingRoomCeilingLight_Switch"          Point_Control_Switch

I have a group which is not part of the model:

"AllLights"               Group

Now I can go one of two routes:

  1. add the point LivingRoomCeilingLight_Switch to the group AllLights
  2. first: configure the equipment LivingRoomCeilingLight so that it aggregates its point(s) of type switch an can thus itself act as a switch.
    then: add LivingRoomCeilingLight to the group AllLights

From your answer, @rlkoshak, I would guess that route number 2 is so out of the ordinary, that it is not recommended :slight_smile:

4

Option 2 won’t work in all cases as you won’t be able to aggregate all the points in an Equipment all the time (in fact it would only be possible only rarely) and it adds complication without any benefit.

1 Like
5

Thanks once more!