[SOLVED] Assistance Needed with OpenHab MQTT Setup

[JustinG]

@gkzsolt

I would like to emphasize that newcomers may struggle to grasp all the intricacies of the OpenHab system.

Making OH more beginner friendly was a driving force behind the MainUI that you now use (you should have seen it before…) and it has been an even bigger push here in version 4. There’s no denying, however, that there’s still lots of room to grow in this area.

@gkzsolt

It is relatively complex, and not everything is intuitive.

This is really the main issue here. While there is not necessarily a direct causal negative relationship between complexity and intuitiveness, there is a strong negative correlation. In order for software such as OH to perform the myriad number of functions that it does, it must have an extremely intricate control system. The UI dev’s do all they can to make this intuitive, but there’s a real limit to just how far that can go. If every single action/activity/setting available to users in OH were made into forms, each form would have an intimidating (and likely incomprehensible) array of inputs and gadgets and info boxes. So, a successful UX means narrowing that down, but that, by definition, means making some assumptions about user needs and desires taking away some user agency. As soon as dev’s have to start making these decisions, there’s a layer of interpretation between software and user and that interpretation will be intuitive for some and not for others.

@gkzsolt

I would greatly appreciate seeing real examples and use cases that demonstrate how to configure specific features from start to finish, as this would be tremendously helpful.

No one here disagrees with that. The only thing standing in the way is enough volunteers and hours in a day. Everything from the source code of the core software to each and every doc page is created and maintained by volunteer work. Suggests for where to focus some of that work are always helpful. When you feel you’re ready, jumping in and helping with the work is even better! With doc pages its pretty easy. At the bottom of every page is this link:

Clicking on that link and adding what you’d like to see is a great way to get started contributing to OH.

@gkzsolt

While this resolved my issue, I must express that I found it to be less than intuitive. I was searching for the item settings on the item’s detail page and would never have guessed that I needed to add metadata to access certain settings.

I can’t disagree with that, maybe given how prominent metadata has become that label would make more sense as Edit Metadata instead. Another good way get in to helping with OH is to file a request or an issue in one of the code repository’s on github. In this case, you’d want to file a request in the UI repository. If you’ve never worked with github before, here’s a great quick intro to OH’s repositories.

@gkzsolt

I have now set up InfluxDB…, but I seem to be misunderstanding how this operates. What am I doing wrong?

I’m not particularly familiar with InfluxDB. This sounds like it would be worth starting a new thread likely to attract users with more experience in that area.