OpenHab Marketing is Lacking

[Oliver2 (Oliver)]

@JimT

Our target users are geeks who love tinkering with technology.

I think that used to be our target user in the past.
OpenHAB made so many progress that we can easily address less experienced users.

[JimT (jimtng)]

@Oliver2

OpenHAB made so many progress that we can easily address less experienced users.

We’re not quite there yet. As @John_Siemon said above, why not market OH to the more technical people who can comfortably use openHAB now. Right now these people may not have even looked at openHAB either because they haven’t heard of it, or comparison sites out there have made OH sound so unfairly inferior that they haven’t bothered checking us out.

[Oliver2 (Oliver)]

Sorry, I disagree. This even reinforces our situation/problem that openHAB is perceived as a home automation solution for geeks and nerds and will make it even more difficult for us to get out of that niche in the (near) future.

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

@jlemmer

I am thinking more of (a) complete start to finish tutorial(s) to realise a concrete use case, (each) devided into three chapters, instead of a “general” getting started guide.

One approach that has worked well for me in the past (and not so well for others so be forewarned) is to create a new thread in the Development: Docs section of the forum for the first rough draft of what ever you are working on. You can request and I or one of the other moderators can convert the first post into a wiki so more than one person can edit it, though in practice that rarely happens.

You can start with a post and an outline and fill it out as you go. You’ll almost certainly get feed back.

@jlemmer

The best would be a little set of fake devices placed on a webpage allowing some sort of interaction. So you could trigger your motion sensor by clicking it, having a “HUE light” that shows how it is dimmed up and down and changes colors, … Then you could open it in a parallel browser window to interact.

You don’t really need a Thing for that though. You can achieve that with just Items. The Thing’s purpose is just to show how to connect the Channels to Items.

@Kim_Andersen

I think its wrong focusing on windows based openHAB.
Two reasons:

1. People are moving away from PC´s and towards mobile devices, smartphones, tablets etc. Alot of “smart home” devices comes with smartphone app today.
2. Windows based PC´s are expencive to have running 24/7. They use quite alot of power. And sometimes they´re even noisy.

A third reason is the overall experience on Windows is not as good as Linux when it comes to installation, upgrades, etc.

[Udo_Hartmann]

@Kim_Andersen

I think its wrong focusing on windows based openHAB.

There should be no “special” focus on Windows for sure, but to be honest, energy consumption is comparable when it comes to Windows vs. GNU/Linux. There are many capable hardware platforms out there, may it be a NUC or a ZimaBoard, and most of power consumption is about the hardware anyway.

Windows gets its points because people are used to Windows.
Most unexperienced users today think there would be a benefit from a GUI like the Windows GUI (“Where is the GUI in openHABian? How to maintain openHAB if there is no GUI?”)
So, for a really low entry barrier, Windows may be appropriate, although most of these users will suffer even to get Windows up and running in the first place. But the computer is already setup to run Windows, that’s the point.

One power of openHAB is, it can be run under Windows, MacOS, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD… you can use a big machine, a Raspberry Pi, a virtual machine, a docker container, even a NAS will be suitable.
So a more or less experienced user could use hardware which he is used to, at least as a starting point.

[Andrew_Rowe]

For Windows, the target hardware is an old laptop. Anybody who uses Windoz has a couple laying around

[Andrew_Rowe]

@rlkoshak

One approach that has worked well for me in the past (and not so well for others so be forewarned) is to create a new thread in the Development: Docs section of the forum for the first rough draft of what ever you are working on. You can request and I or one of the other moderators can convert the first post into a wiki so more than one person can edit it, though in practice that rarely happens.

Listen to Rich, this works, that is how we developed the blockly reference docs

[Andrew_Rowe]

@JimT

We’re not quite there yet.

@Oliver2

Sorry, I disagree.

Oliver… Jim is right, but…

@Oliver2

This even reinforces our situation/problem that openHAB is perceived as a home automation solution for geeks and nerds and will make it even more difficult for us to get out of that niche in the (near) future.

This is true
We don’t want to position ourselves into that niche. I propose a compromise. How about we develop the marketing with the idea that even a less tech minded person can handle this but we promote it in more techy outlets first. Like Jim continues

@JimT

Right now these people may not have even looked at openHAB either because they haven’t heard of it, or comparison sites out there have made OH sound so unfairly inferior that they haven’t bothered checking us out.

[ubeaut (Greg)]

I worked in IT for 30 years and I have been home automation for probably 20 years.
I have used MisterHouse ,domotica and Openhab and have used rfxcom, X10 (which I don’t use now). I am phsing out wifi devices mainly because Tuya killed the fun of that idea and am going Zigbee using Zigbee2mqtt and have never used the Zigbee Openhab binding.

Openhab is the best I have used but when I first started using it back in OH2.5 even I found it hard to work out. I eventually found a YouTube video in German that showed my how to do the thing and channel and item. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, well a video is worth a million words in my opinion.

My Openhab system is nothing fancy and I have a few rules all in JavaScript (ported over to the latest version) and I still don’t know how to read the JavaScript manuals that people refer to me to use. EG Overview (openHAB Core 4.1.0-SNAPSHOT API)
No idea what I am looking at.

All I need is a dumbed down example to work on and I am good to go.
The examples here Home - Documentation were good enough for what I needed.

P.S I have looked at Home Assistant and I cannot understand why it is so popular as the YAML stuff would do my head in and I do admit I didn’t spend too much time looking at it because who wants to check the configuration files after every change and then have to reload everything? Not me that’s for sure. I do look at their examples of how to set up devices so I can do the same in OpenHab and that has come in handy.

Am I the target audience for Openhab?

Anyway that is my 2 cents worth.

[Andrew_Rowe]

Greg
I feel like you are our sort of typical marketing target

@ubeaut

I worked in IT for 30 years

smart techie guy

The ‘outgrowers’
That is our target

Hue app isn’t exactly childen’s play, getting it all set up, the right rooms, scenes, … then eventually, they ‘outgrow’ it, they want true automation. HA looks good at first but… eventually they ‘outgrow’ it

[Kim_Andersen]

I have 8 laptops, (only 2 are running), and a desktop platform, (desktop is running when I feel like playing a game, which is very rare since a coupple of years now… Hmm, its outdated and need exchange/upgrade I guess ).

The 6 laptops not running, havnt been turned on in years, and I have got idea about their status.

[smitopher (Christopher Smith)]

@ubeaut

I worked in IT for 30 years

@ubeaut

Am I the target audience for Openhab?

I think that you would be considered a “power user” of IT products

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

@ubeaut

I still don’t know how to read the JavaScript manuals that people refer to me to use. EG Overview (openHAB Core 4.1.0-SNAPSHOT API)
No idea what I am looking at.

That could be confusing because that does not have anything to do with JavaScript. Those are the Java Docs of everything that goes into the making of OH. In those rare cases where you have to deal with the raw Java stuff from OH, that’s where you are going to find the methods and data available on each Class that OH implements.

You should almost never have to go there unless you are trying to do something not supported by the helper library, looking to contribute to the helper library, or want to write rules without the helper library, there is little reason to have to use the JavaDocs.

@ubeaut

The examples here Home - Documentation were good enough for what I needed.

Ironically, that’s just the JavaScript version of JavaDocs for the helper library and really not something you’d be expected to use that much either. It lists all the classes and all the data and methods on the classes. That actually is relevant when writing JS Scripting rules. But even there, those docs are really only relevant if there is something not covered or not clear in JavaScript Scripting - Automation | openHAB which are the primary reference docs for JS Scripting.

There are lots more human readable examples there and those docs show you how to actually use the Classes in context. But, of course, the add-on readme also links to those class docs. For example:

Items

The items namespace allows interactions with openHAB Items. Anywhere that a native openHAB Item is required, the runtime will automatically convert the JS-Item to its Java counterpart.

See openhab-js : items (opens new window)for full API documentation.

• items : object
• .NAME ⇒ Item

Using JavaScript Scripting - Automation | openHAB (or the equivalent for the other languages) as the first place to look to to answer all the questions about writing rules in JavaScript was pretty much the whole reason Rules - Advanced | openHAB in Getting Started exists at all.

[nelson.aponte]

@ubeaut

P.S I have looked at Home Assistant and I cannot understand why it is so popular

@ubeaut, that could simply be because they are more active in the media than we are. At least that’s my impression. I don’t remember having come across articles about OH. I believe that’s what we should focus on after the Getting Started document has been published.

[ubeaut (Greg)]

Thanks for pointing out the docs I was looking at were not JavaScript. No wonder they made no sense.
Also with some of the examples and solutions I cannot figure out if they are DSL or JavaScript. That would also lead to confusion.
Anyway I have a working system which does what I want and I don’t change it that much once it up and running.
Keep up the good work.

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

@ubeaut

Also with some of the examples and solutions I cannot figure out if they are DSL or JavaScript. That would also lead to confusion.

Unfortunately we don’t have enough moderators to follow behind every post and ensure tags are appropriate and every reply mentions the language being used. I tried for awhile but gave up.

Rules-of-thumb:

If you see the following it’s Rules DSL:

• a rule starts with rule and has when, then, and end
• Items are referenced directly by name
• core actions like executeCommandLine, createTimer, sendHttpGetRequest are referenced directly
• you see blocks of code enclosed by [ | ]

If you see the following it’s JS Scripting:

• a rule starts with JSRule or looks like it’s built from a bunch of function calls
• Items are always got at through items using items.getItem('MyItem'), items.MyItem or items['MyItem']
• core actions are referenced through actions (e.g. actions.excecuteCommandLine(...)
• [ ] are only used in reference to defining or obtaining an element of an Array or Dict.
• you see function() or () =>

If you see none of that it’s probably jRuby (if it’s a recent example) or Jython (if it’s an old example). The jRuby examples are usually well labeled. There are few examples of Groovy or Java Scripting on the forum.

In the main docs, if there will either be a table that shows it in several languages, or you should assume Rules DSL (for now).

Note, I don’t think this is off topic. It’s stuff like this that needs to be addressed.

[vanja (galaxy)]

hey guys, here is my 2 cents on the topic of comparison HA - OH
Both of those systems targeted audience are some kind of power users for sure.
When a “normal” user hears about needing to setup some kind of linux system on a raspberry PI, game over. Or docker, even worse.
If you sold it to him preinstalled and prepacked in some plug and play box, then maaaybe…
Normal user goes for google home or alexa.
Only “geeks” go for homeassistant and openhab.
This is the reality of the situation of home automation market.
The difference between oh and ha is just flavor. Lets say HA is Ubuntu (looks nice but normal user still uses windows (alexa), and OH is Slackware or Debian. (little bit more hardcore then ubuntu, but same concept basically)

example

Controlling My Family’s Smart Home Is Driving Us Mad

this guy is considered an expert in the normal people world. he has this crazy, complicated smart home setup

[yab (Marino Schwedhelm)]

This week I saw about five headlines about Home Assistant on Google News. Zero from openHAB.

[nelson.aponte]

Hi everyone.

I wonder if there is anything that can be done similar to what many brands, such as HomeKit (and even Homey) do with the “works with Homey” badge.
Homey is quite new but it will get at the same level, and maybe even higher, of Home Assistant in terms of marketing quite soon. Even HA doesn’t have the “works with HA” shown on the websites of big smart home manufacturers.

I believe it would be beneficial for our marketing efforts to have partnership with companies so they showcase that their products work with OpenHAB. For example, we seem to be having an issue with Yale (Yale/August smart locks with WiFi support [3.3.0;3.5.0) - #84 by nelson.aponte) because we don’t have one.