Replacing SmartThings API with OpenHAB + OpenHAB-cloud

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I’ve shared it elsewhere and even have posted some tutorials. At a high level:

  • I’ve two OH instances, one at my home and one at my dad’s home.

  • I run pfSense as my firewall and use the openVPN server built into that. If I were not running that I’d probably set up a Wireguard service on a VPS somewhere using one of the several scripts that makes that easy. So I do have a port exposed on the internet on this pfSense box so that I can connect to the VPN when not at home so I also have a bunch of other stuff to monitor and generate alerts also running. I also require certificate based authentication.

  • My remote openHAB RPi machine connects to this VPN at boot time. The routing is configured so that all the machines connected to the pfSense machine and all the machines connected to the VPN can see each other. Therefore, for all intents and purposes, that remote openHAB instance is on my LAN.

  • All our phones are configured with an openVPN client and using Tasker they automatically connect to the VPN when not on the home network. Therefore even the phones can see both instances of openHAB as if they were local.

  • However, to get push notifications the openHAB instances either need to be connected to myopenhab.org or one needs to use something other than the built in notifications (email, email to SMS gateway, Telegram, etc.).

No possible. openHAB has text file based configs which are stored in /etc/openhab (for OH 3, $OH_CONF) and /var/lib/openhab (for OH 3 $OH_USERDATA). A lot of people, myself included, check all of $OH_CONF and most of $OH_USERDATA into source control.

As an aside, if you haven’t yet, you should look into Ansible for building and deploying all this stuff.

openHAB can persist it’s Item states for analysis and charting to any supported database that can be reached on the network the openHAB instance is connected to.

openHAB uses log4j2 as it’s logger. There are a number of appenders that can be configured.

I’ve been using the GoControl HUSZB-1 for years for both zwave and zigbee. I’ve never had a complaint. It works and is rock solid in my experience. Keep in mind that zigbee is prone to interference from WiFi. In an apartment situation that could become more of a problem.

That journal article went nowhere. The authors did not work with us and did not contribute anything back to the community. It’s a dead end and was based on an old version of openHAB when the paper was published. It would have been wonderful but once they go their publication they disappeared. They didn’t even try to contribute it back.

Some potentially relevant tutorials:

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