This might help with some of the trouble you’re having following the different pieces. It’s a lot at first, so this simple breakdown might make it esier:
All parts of the semantic model, including equipment and points are just items of different types. So when you “Create equipment from thing” what you are really doing is creating one group item (the equipment) which is automatically placed within the location group item that is currently selected in the model. Then each of the points that you also add are just regular items that are automatically place with that equipment group item. So this means that the setting you selected when adding points are the item settings.
When you press save after setting up the “Create equipment from thing” wizard, all the items are created so if you need to go back and change settings, you need to go to the item list. Some of the basic settings are still available right in the Model page when you click on one of the points, but to get the full suite of settings you must go to that item’s full details page. This is true for the State Description Pattern which is actually some metadata that is stored with the item, so you go to the item’s detail page, click the Add Metadata button and then select State Description from the list of common metadata namespaces.
Correct. Many of the more specific Things in OH come with preset channels appropriate for that Thing. But more general things, such as an MQTT thing cannot know in advance much about the channel that you need to you need to add the channel configuration. It helps to think about the channels, not as properties of a Thing, but as specific objects themselves which mediate access to a thing. One of the concepts that (I hope) is clear from the glossary above and can be found in a few places in the help docs is the basic arrangement of concept layers for OH:
[world] <-> [binding] <-> [thing] <-> [channel] <-> [link] <-> [item]
Each of these is its own type of relevant object and most are one-to-many connections (one binding can have many things). The exception is that a Link connects one Item to one Channel.
So you are adding a channel object to your MQTT thing in oder to be able to create a link which allows an item to communiate up the chain with the outside world.
I hope this makes more sense now. On the Thing’s channel tab the All option shows every Channel already configured for the Thing. The Linked option shows only those Channels that already have a Link to an Item.
If the Channel shows up in the All tab then you have successfully created it. Now you just have to link an Item to it.
This is a persistence feature. rrd4j persistence should be installed and configured automatically unless you disabled this during the initial setup. If you are not seeing a graph of the historical data for that Item when you press analyze. Then there is something wrong with your presitence configuration.
Category is the way you can assign on of the default OH icons to an item. That’s pretty much all it does. You can put arbitrary text in there because it is possible for you to create your own OH icons if you wish, but it auto-suggests the ones that already exist. You can see a list of the built-in icons here: