Maybe a showcase part could be nice to help people showing the power of openHAB?
But of course, it would be nice to see it ‘realtime’, and not only printscreens. I don’t know if it could be possible to allow somewhere an upload of the items/sitemaps/…, and that the sitemaps can be shown/pushed/…?
And this with a kind of point system so people can give their idea about the look-n-feel, technical part…?
So that new people directly see the nicest things of openHAB?
The challenge with that is that a lot of what makes mine and I’m sure a lot of other’s home automation systems is in the Rules, not the sitemap. And it is hard to simulate the Rules part in a showcase like that. The problem is both technical (i.e. how do you make Rules that depend on the values from sensors) and visual (how do you show lights turning on when it gets dark).
And for me, my sitemap is a mess largely because I use it as a quick and dirty way to check on my HA status. All the controls happen automatically or based on stimulus provided external to OH (e.g. a REST call from my phone).
I find HA is at its best when it doesn’t require a user interface at all.
I didn’t want OH make the big part as a home automation solution but a intuitiv controling unit with 1 device instead of 73498354 switches and remotes allover the place.
So the visual part is very important to me
