openHAB 3.0 Milestone 5 discussion

Setup, Configuration and Use News & Important Changes
91

Hi,
After being absent from the openHAB scene for a few years (on account of running a home brew system based on MQTT, Node-RED, etc.) I am getting ready to dip my toe in the water again.

So far I have “installed” openHAB Release 3.0.0 M5 as a docker container, and I am playing around with it on the side to get a feel for the new concepts (my previous experience was with openHAB 2).

I must say my first impression was very good! I really like the way this is going.

I do have some observations, though, that I would like to share and hopefully get some feeback on.

The first two I feel may be some kind of error in the system, while the latter two are maybe more related to my lack of understanding of the concepts so far.

Observation 1

Main page (the one that you land on when accessing the Main UI)

At the bottom of the page, there are three tabs: Overview, Locations, Equipment and Properties

Unless I totally miss the point (no pun intended), these tabs are supposed to reflect the semantic model. In this case, I guess the “properties”-tab should be called “points”, or?

Observation 2

Aministration > Settings > Pages

I am unable to delete (remove) pages that I have created. When I select a page and click on Remove, I get a pop-up message saying “Removing page…” (or something similar) but this never disappears and consequently the UI is now blocked.

Observation 3

Aministration > Settings > Model

Is there a way to add a new top layer in the hiearchy? Let’s say I created my first location as House, and added sub-location for some floors, and then some rooms, etc. If I then reconsidered my concept,
and wanted to introduce a new top-level layer called “Indoor”, I don’t see a way to do this. Is this possible without recreating the entire model?

Similarily, if I wanted to move a sub-location (say a room) from one location to another location (say from the first floor to the second floor), is this possible? Disregarding the obvious fact that this would be a huge reconstruction project in my house, I think it could be a relevant thing to need to do while working on building up a model, :slight_smile:

Observation 4

Aministration > Settings > Items

It is not possible to chnage the name of an Item once it is created. This seems like a rather severe limitation of the system, and quite a deviation from what one was used to.
Is this a temporary shortcoming of the system, or something that will be kept as it is?

1 Like
92

I had the same issue with OH 2.5.
The only solution so far is to activate 2 factor authentication on your amazon acoount.
After that i didn’t have the problem anymore
see Release Candidate and Support: Amazon Echo Control Binding and Release Candidate and Support: Amazon Echo Control Binding

93

I’ll have a look at it later today, the validation on number parameters causes some problems.

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94

Just discovered that ZWave neither discovery nor inclusion works.
Even when I manually add a thing and “start scan”, nothing happens on ZWave level.
That would be a major bummer I’d think. Had to take OH down and use some 3rd party tool.

I opened an issue against openhab-addons but since @chris mentioned at times the OH3 binding is essentially unchanged vs the OH2 one, and I get no ZWave log output, I think the problem is rather with the GUI not correctly triggering that.
But I have no idea how to debug that.

95

ooh! I need to test that.
I know there were at least some binding changes. When I first tried OH3 the zwave binding interdered with astro. Chris quickly fixed that though.

96

Is anyone successfully using jdbc-mysql persistence? I posted here about my inability to get it working, but got no responses.

97

I have it running fine here. Don’t think I can be of any use solving your problem, but at least you know it’s not something globally general…

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98

Thanks. Good to know. I’ll keep hunting…

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99

@mstormi I have been using the Zwave binding without problems on OH3 since M1, currently on snapshot from a few days old.
Inclusion works fine here.
I am running OH3 as docker container in a Synology NAS.

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100

@chris @mstormi

Yep - same here with adding a Qubino. No luck.

EDIT: With M5-1 it works again. I just by chance had update of OH

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101

In MainUI there is a bug in “Add Items from Textual Definition”; when trying to import textual Items like Group:Number:Temperature:AVG below, the parser already gets sick when it encounters a second : colon symbol, (and I suppose it would be unhappy with the thrird colon too).

Group:Number:Temperature:AVG g_Upstairs_Temperature "Upstairs Temperature [%.1f %unit%]" <temperature>

Error: Syntax error at line 5 col 25:
  Group:Number:Temperature:
                          ^
Unexpected colon token: ":". Instead, I was expecting to see one of the following:
102

That one at least is easy to answer. Create an Indoor Group. Then go to your House Group and make it a member of the Indoor Group. You might need to do this from the Item’s page instead of the model page.

Same thing. Remove it from the first floor group and add it to the second floor group.

No, I think it’s always been the case that you can’t change the name of an Item. It appeared that you could do so, and you can still do so, with .items files because when a .items file is loaded, all the Items that were defined by the file are destroyed and then recreated when the file is loaded. So it’s really still working the way it always has. The problem is the Item name is the UUID for the Item. You can’t change a UUID once the entity is created generally.

1 Like
103

I did discover a workaround. If this is harmful to the system, I hope someone smarter than me tells me!

You first have to stop openHAB, then you can edit the items definition jsondb file. I’m on my mobile so I don’t have the exact path, but it’s under the user data folder. You also need to update the item name in channel links if the item is linked to a thing. I haven’t worked much on pages yet but I presume they also would need to be updated with the new item name, either textually or with the UI.

Welcome back! I currently use nodeRED in conjunction with openHAB 2.5 but hope to create an OH3 system that barely relies on it or other services. I do intend to keep nodeRED connected as I want to use it as a starting point to teach my kids about programming.

104

Thx! Your suggestion worked like a charm. In hindsight I don’t understand why I did not think of this approach, but I guess that is the beauty of hindsight; it makes things seem so much clearer, :slight_smile:

105

I’d like to download M5 and test it on MacOS, but on the officially linked page only M4 is available for download (https://next.openhab.org/download/). Can someone point me to the right download folder?

106

Try this

https://openhab.jfrog.io/openhab/libs-milestone-local/org/openhab/distro/openhab/3.0.0.M5/openhab-3.0.0.M5.zip

1 Like
107

When you have validation messages like this, it’s because the thing type defines some constraints. You’ll have to check the thing type definition in the binding to see if they’re correct.

108

Done - adding a module now looks like this

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I tried to group the core module types into categories that made sense - of course you still have the old list with a list of all module types if you click “Show all”. These big buttons cover the core module types (which will be probably 99% of all).
There are well-known so we can deviate from the generic config sheet; in many cases after you’ve selected a category you can switch between types, for items you even have to pick the item first, then the type of trigger, it made more sense that way IMO.

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For scripts, you get a nice menu with Blockly + the installed languages, and clicking in the menu gets you straight into the script editor, no more shenanigans.

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There’s a little caveat, for technical reasons the rule has to be saved (or created if it doesn’t exist yet) before you get to the editor.

9 Likes
109

Just installed 3.0 M4 and slowly added my things and everything is working great! I decided to refactor my things, items and rules. I did not notice that the myopenhab.com is not working and thus Alexa is broken. Can I use the OpenHab Bridge on 2.5.10 to control my devices on 3.0 M4 until we have native support?

110

Hi Everyone,

I’m coming from 2.5.10 where I had text-based configuration of almost everything, and have moved to a new place. I figured I would take the opportunity to try something new, and have just installed 3.0.0.M5 in a Docker container, and so far so good! A lot of excellent improvements that in time will surely make OH more accessible, without compromising on functionality.

I have what might be a silly question… when the next milestone is released, how do I upgrade without starting from scratch? The documentation for OH2.5.x Docker suggests the /openhab/userdata folder will carry across the config, but my userdata folder looks empty…

I am using docker-compose to run the container, with the docker-compose.yml below:

version: '2.2'

services:
  openhab:
    image: "openhab/openhab:3.0.0.M5"
    restart: always
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
      - "/etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro"
      - "/etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro"
      - "./openhab_addons:/opt/openhab/addons"
      - "./openhab_conf:/opt/openhab/conf"
      - "./openhab_userdata:/opt/openhab/userdata"
    environment:
      USER_ID: 999
      GROUP_ID: 998
      OPENHAB_HTTP_PORT: "8080"
      OPENHAB_HTTPS_PORT: "8443"
      EXTRA_JAVA_OPTS: "-Duser.timezone=US/Central"

It seems like if I remove the container and pull down a new image, I’ll be starting over? Where is all the configuration I’m doing in the Main UI stored?

Am I missing something silly? I’m super new to Docker, it wouldn’t surprise me if one of my mount / environment commands wasn’t right, or I’ve got a permissions issue.

Also… I really miss the frontail log from 2.5.x - can I reinstall that? Any other options I would need to set in the docker-compose.yml file?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!