openHABcloud - sharing sensor data?

Hi openHABers,

during my process of having switched from 1.8 to 2.0 betas and latest snapshot on Pi (this community and openHABian rulez! :+1:) I came across several buddies that also use and play with openHAB for their home automation. Everyone has different use cases in mind and has different sensors installed within their homes locally.

So with all these different sensor data available and having something like the openHAB cloud in place it would
be cool to be able to share local sensor data through the cloud with e.g. my neighbour who might also be interested in my wind- or sunlight sensor information. This way my buddy could reuse sensor data that my local openHAB installation has published into the cloud. He could subscribe to this information and use this data into his items, rules and actions.

I browsed through the community and haven’t yet found information if this is planned or is already possible with the openHAB cloud.

Would this be something to consider as use case for upcoming openHAB cloud services? Maybe this has already been discussed and I did not find it - if so I apologize for bringing this up again…

Cheers,
Bernd

1 Like

This is not a use case I’ve seen brought up here before. In fact most of the requests and complaints are more focused on preventing that sort of thing from happening.

I can think of a lot of ways one could get something like this working but none of them work through openHAB Cloud.

@bernd_d,

thanks for sharing your mind!
At the moment this is not implemented. From an use case perspective it sounds interesting. Generally the data can flow into the same database and there could be some actions, services based on this sensor data. OH cloud is primarily a secure remote access point and the integration point for cloud based features like IFTTT. This kind of OH-user wide bigdata services, we havent discussed in the forum as far as I know.
You should keep in mind that openHAB follows the concept of data economy and minimisation, next to giving users the possibility to run their smarthome even if the cloud is not available, often reffered as Intranet of Things. We want to ensure data privacy and protection.
With this in mind, and assuming to provide this as myopenHAB services, there are several things to be clearified before going into such discussions e.g. a concept to grant, revoke the access for neighbours semsor data or to bring in more anonymization possibilities if data flows between users.

BR Mehmet

Thank for for clarifying the actual scope of the openhab cloud services @MARZIMA . I also like the approach
of remote operations of my local environment, however I’d personally just open a VPN tunnel. But having the possibilities to integrate IFTTT is really great.
I totally understand the security concerns, as this is of course one of the main inhibitors to make use of a shared cloud service. So I bet there has been lots of efforts to ensure this as @rlkoshak mentioned.

@rlkoshak, you mentioned of “ways to get something like this (…“sharing sensor data”…) working” - would you share your thoughts? :relaxed:

It depends largely on your level of trust with the people you are sharing with and the degree of control you want to have over what data can be shared.

If you have full trust and/or want to share everything then you can just create account on myopenhab.org for those users and they can access your Item through the REST API.

If you want more control you can set up an MQTT Broker exposed to the internet, configured securely with certs and ACLs which will allow you to pick and choose what you expose to whom.

I’m sure you could set something up through IFTTT that would work.

You could set up a web page on your server that populates itself with the states of your Items through OH’s REST API. This web page is what gets exposed to the Internet that your friends can access.

I’m sure there are more.

Rich