Should I start with OpenHAB 3 now?

I consider myself a strong openhab 2 user, and excited for 3 but if Im honest and I know its not ready for prime time but I just cant work out OH3 - ive looked at the wiki tutorials and they all make sense but to get a sensible page with icons that do something I have not been able to - all the examples seem to skip over the bits to make them functional and screnshots show amazing things but all mine are groups or items that show a big NULL on them.

Id love some more beginner guides - im across adding items and coming to terms with the new terminology and seantic stuff its the UX thats stumping me.

How is a newbie going to dive into this?

  1. Continue to use sitemaps or HABPanel
  2. If you’ve built your semantic model, a ui is built for you in the Overview page’s tabs. You can customize how the lists and cards on that page look by setting the default widget metadata.
  3. Wait for new docs to be written. With the number if people contributing that might be a bit of a wait. We are all volunteers and there are not to many actually volunteering to help with the docs. Just yesterday I added about 20,000 words and a couple dozen screenshots.
3 Likes

Im guessing sitemaps could be imported from or be used from textual 2.5 versions?

This is where things start to unravel for me ive seen screenshots of just this - I dilligently followed the semantic tutorial - and that was really well written and easy to follow but i dont have a UI built for me as you say - I must have missed something?

Yes I must confess I am definately a taker not a giver in this regard and appreciate everything every volunteer does in the community and often pull myself back when I “expect” things to be different. I will keep looking and watching he official doco and the valuable work you do @rlkoshak to help raise knowledge with tutorials and your experiences.

Absolutely.

Without more details I can’t begin to say what, but you must have missed something. When you configure your Items to put them into the model, the Locations, Equipment, and Properties tabs of the Overview page (the Page that is there by default) gets populated automatically from the model.

A post was merged into an existing topic: Control Squeezebox (LMS) with Alexa via OpenHAB?

It is a skill, you need to install it on your amazon device.

Oops, I meant to say “binding”, or whatever I need to install in order for the skill to be able to communicate with OpenHAB. But I guess I’m misunderstanding something… :thinking:

So are you saying all I need is to connect my OH instance to myopenhab.org using the openhab cloud connector to establish that connection? (Plus add alexa metadata to relevant items, of course)

For that you need the skill, installed on your amazon device.

For that you would need to install the Amazon Echo Control Binding.

I still don’t know what you want to achieve, please read the relevant sections in the docs:

1 Like

I don’t have that binding installed but I can add alexa metadata.

I want to send commands from Alexa to my openHAB instance .

I have read the page about the Alexa skill and am planning to submit some suggestions for improving that documentation, but before I can do that, I first need to understand things myself. From what I can tell now, the main reason why that documentation page is not helping me is that it doesn’t start with instructions and the headings are somewhat misleading:

The heading Setup suggests that what follows are instructions for how to set things up. But the first thing that follows is a lost of what has been improved in version 3 of the API. - Fair enough. I’m experienced enough to realize that this is irrelevant for me so I jump to the next paragraph: “Requirements”. Very good. It tells me what I need, so I make sure I have that. Check :white_check_mark:

And now I’m missing the most important section on the page: instructions explaining the overall setup. Before I can understand the recommendations, there is a lot I need to know.

I’ll blame myself for not immediately understanding that the only thing I need to install is the skill on my amazon device and the openHAB Cloud connector on my OH instance. But I’d suggest to clarify that. Also what exactly needs to be configured in the Cloud Connector addon (and where in OH3 I can find it once it’s installed). The documentation is very short. (I’m not complaining, just explaining why I’m asking questions.)

Anyway, that’s where I am now. Trying to figure out what else I need to know before I can make use of those “Recommendations”. I think one think that should be mentioned is about exposing Items in the cloud connector addon.

I don’t quite get it. My intuition tells me that whatever I select to expose here will be exposed to myopenhab.org (and hence Alexa) and everything else will not be exposed. But this is not what I’m seeing. I have not yet exposed anything (and the list of Items on myopenHAB.org is empty) but my Alexa device found one of my openHAB devices today. I know it’s an openHAB device because it has a strange label (“Control”), which is the default label it was assigned in my semantic model.

The reason why Alexa discovered the item seems to be that I added Alexa Metadata to it:

So I would imagine that the next step in the instructions would be to add such metadata to relevant items (and to create those items if they don’t exist yet).

I’ll stop here, but I hope the above might help to clarify the troubles of a new user, which, I know, are often difficult to anticipate for experienced users (who tend to be the ones writing the documentation…).

I have read enough about the Echo Control binding to understand that I don’t need it as I don’t want to control the Alexa devices via openHAB but the other way around.

Docs in openHAB3 are not ready yet, one reason is it is not released (still a milestone).

My intuition tells me that whatever I select to expose here will be exposed to myopenhab.org (and hence Alexa) and everything else will not be exposed.

You don’t need to expose any items to the cloud for Alexa to work. Due to server abuse this function is disabled anyway.

Correct.

Correct. But you won’t find those instructions in each and every binding section as this would be repeated then a couple of hundred times. You should find that in the general doc section.

There are only a few users yet on openHAB3. I suggest to start reading the wiki posts:

I was trying to provide feedback on how the documentation can be improved. Neither the problems I’m encountering nor the solutions I suggested are specific to OH3.

I believe that’s what hyperlinks are for.

Go ahead an fill in 424 hyperlinks :-)))

grafik

Contributing to the docs is highly welcome but please don’t shout this into some thread and wait for someone to take the ball but get active yourself. There’s an “edit” button at the bottom of each page.

PS: and you’re way off topic meanwhile.

This is not “some thread” but a thread I started a while ago and which I continued with a direct reaction to things that people had said earlier.

When it became clear that the subsequent replies to my originally on-topic question were less about OH3 and more about the Alexa skill and how it is documented, I asked the moderators to move my post and the subsequent replies into a different topic where they seemed more relevant. Unfortunately, only my post but not the replies were moved. Because of this, it seemed reasonable to continue replying here (at the same time that pointed out to the moderator that the replies should also be moved).

Did you see that I said that I

I am moderator that’s why I came across this. But you mustn’t expect moderators or anyone else to dig through some lengthy thread just because someone wants it to be split
Open a new one yourself or at least rename the old one.

I know what it is like to be a moderator (I run several discourse forums myself). That’s why my request for moving the discussion was as specific as possible: “Could you please move this post and the ones replying to it to this topic …”.

So as a moderator dealing with this request, I would either accept it (and move the post and its replies) or deny it (i.e. not move anything). I don’t see how moving only the first post and not the replies improves anything.

I think that it is the very nature of a discussion thread (= topic) that you keep replying within the thread, as long as the reply is on topic. This is what I did. But sometimes discussions take unexpected turns so that it retrospectively becomes clear that certain posts actually fit better into a different topic (or should be a topic on their own) and in those cases moderators can fix this by moving those posts. That is the very task of the moderators: to keep the communication on the forum as orderly and accessible as possible.

IMHO, this is bad advice. Renaming the entire topic to make it fit whatever the current posts are about is misleading to anyone reading the topic for the first time. Moving off-topic posts is exactly what the “move posts” feature was designed for.

No, but I would expect moderators and anyone else to read what I said in a particular thread before giving me advice that I already adhered to, in this case, telling me to contribute to the documentation when I already said that this is what I intend to do.

Feel free to handle your own moderations whatever way you want but this isn’t yours so you must not and may not expect your expectations on moderation to be met here. I chose to ignore your request and replied to the contents as a user that also wants people to stay on topic and (unlike you) expects new threads to be opened or renamed when the topic changes.

If you’re on a raspberry pi, as of version 1.63, I would say the answer is definitely do not use version 3.
The most basic functions do not work. You can’t set your time zone. The first time you reboot your administrator account is lost. etc.

And you’ve filed issues for these? I’ve not see either of these problems reported anywhere else.

I am on RPI and do not have any major issues.