Just had a look at http://www.smarthomedb.com/
Nice DB about Smart Home Products. It could be useful to use such playbooks also for Openhab --> to Show compatibilities and make a first time Hardware Setup for openhab easier. Openhab is not yet listed on smarthomedb.
What do you think about that?
Regards
Herbert
@hl_at: Thank you for the plug, highly appreciated.
We have added the following records:
www.smarthomedb.com/company/openhab/c409
Please note that at the moment our primary focus of SmartHomeDB is on integrated Hardware & Software solutions as we believe these are the most plug & play for mainstream consumers.
The rule we apply now for the sake of simplicity is that we only list compatibilities for integrated Hardware & Software solutions and not yet for pure Software-Only solutions. This particular rule may still be adjusted in the future.
With regards to our Playbook Module, I am actually very open to the idea of having a custom widget for openHAB users.
@kai could this be something worth considering?
Example playbook:
www.smarthomedb.com/joelrushworth
Note:
Current version is still very raw… Not yet mobile/tablet friendly.
Hm, to be honest, I have not yet fully grasped the idea of these playbooks. It is for users to sketch their personal setup? What features could a “custom widget” have besides a special shape and a custom icon?
@kai So it is indeed for users to sketch out their planned or existing personal setup.
So besides a special shape and custom icon, a custom playbook widget for openHAB would also be able to link with a custom compatibilities database so users are able to (visually) understand if a user would buy a Z-Wave USB Stick, a Yale Z-Wave Lock, an Insteon Hub, an Insteon Motion Sensor, a Philips Hue Bridge, a Philips Hue Bulb and a MiLight how these products would be connected with one another via openHAB and all respective hardware, and with which other products these particular products could hypothetically be connected with.
Additionally the Playbook is linked with our How-To’s Module so besides the visualization the user also gets a list of How-To’s to figure out how to actually get things up and running. So a custom openHAB playbook widget would be linked with a custom openHAB how-to’s module.
So if you go to:
www.smarthomedb.com/playbook
And double-click the Wi-Fi Router you will see compatible Wi-Fi Products. If you then add a Hub (e.g. a SmartThings Hub) and double click the SmartThings Hub in the graph, you will see compatible SmartThings Hub products.
If you scroll-down you will see a How-To’s Section which I believe speaks for itself.
A demo How-To page:
http://www.smarthomedb.com/howto/tutorial?type=1
Thanks for the explanations, @chun!
It looks indeed interesting, but I am wondering, how all this information is maintained and kept up-to-date?
Looking at the sheer mass of bindings and supported devices in openHAB, I cannot think of any clever process how this could possibly be achieved…
@kai So the compatibilities / interoperability database on SmartHomeDB:
http://www.smarthomedb.com/compatibilities is managed by me personally at the moment to set the quality standard for the long term future. Besides closely following the market developments, we are getting submissions from enthusiasts and industry stakeholders which we then process, which goes relatively smooth.
So there is a lookup feature in the back-end via which you can immediately add multiple compatible products. We also have a neat script for IFTTT so every time we add a new IFTTT channel to the database all the other products with their own IFTTT channels are automatically added as compatibilities, so this is a significant time saver. I’ll show you a demo via screen share whenever convenient.
Over time we will facilitate open editing of the compatibilities database but naturally only to ‘trusted’ community members and there will be a very tight history log to be able to crystal clearly understand what was updated by who.
So the above is my answer to how we are approaching the clever aspect you are referring to, at the moment I do not yet have a better alternative.
So I believe a similar approach (open community editing) can be applied to the openHAB compatibilities database. I do believe it is important to have a reference list (ideally verified in the real world) to understand with what openHAB is exactly compatible, especially for new users to openHAB.
One final note on the Playbook module which you may have already noticed is the fact that users can indicate whether they own specific products or have activated specific compatibilities:
So this data is naturally also very useful for new users as you can basically rank the compatibilities based on real-life implementations.
