OpenHab the right tool for my simple use case?

Hardware Server
1

Right now I’m using my Raspberry to turn on or off any devices with 433 Mhz power switches on a regular base, e.g. turn on lights on sunset and turn it off either manually via a smartphone app or late in the evening automatically.

I use a nice tool called piSchedule which uses pilight and which works fine. Right now it’s running on Wheezy which is no longer supported so I plan to setup a new OS running Stretch. But it looks like there is no support on Stretch for piSchedule and now I’m looking for an alternative.

Is OpenHab able to replace my old setup? Actually I’m also wondering whether my Raspberry A1 is able to run OpenHab.

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OpenHAB is more than able to deal with you use case. However your hardware might not.
I was running OH1.8 on a RaspiA1 and it was quite slow and wouldn’t really run anything
else. We are now on OpenHAB2.3 and I don’t won’t if the A1 would be able to cope with that.
I would recommend that you acquire a Pi3

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Thank you very much for your reply.

I actually expected my A1 so be too slow :tired_face:

I checked plight and it supports eventing which seems to be a lightweight alternative. Actually I have to create the rules in plain text files but that’s OK for me.

I frankly thought it’s time for me to use a mature home automation server so I’m able to add additional sensors and devices at some point in time in the future.

I don’t want to throw away my good old A1 and buy a B3 for this simple use case and therfore will evaluate pilight. If it doesn’t fulfill my requirements I’ll buy a B3 and will evaluate OpenHab :slightly_smiling_face:

I also found FHEM as a home automation server. But it uses Perl which is an ugly language. Java is a much better language and I may be able to provide some coding help for OpenHab. Let’s see how far I get with pilight.

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Consider using your A1 Pi for something else, like pihole or even openVPN, if you have a need for those services. You could probably even run an MQTT broker on it, if you end up using it. But, get a B3 for openHAB, since it requires more resources to run anything more than a basic home automation server.

1 Like
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I actually run openvpn and pihole together with piSchedule and pilight on the A1 :smiley: Frankly I already own a B3 but I need this as a test system for raspiBackup and cannot be used for production :frowning_face:

I’ll migrate all services from wheezy to stretch now. If pilight cannot be used for my use case I’ll evaluate OpenHab