Hello Guys.
Currently i’m using Smarthome.py/SmartVISU for my KNX solution at home.
I was thinking of switching to OpenHab - but i’m a bit in doubt about the following:
Is there other UI available than the “Classic”, “Paper” and “Basic” ( i haven’t seen the “Basic” and “Paper” since they don’t Work on the openhab.org demo?) - i think the SmartVisu / GIRA HomeServer has a great design - which i think maybe is missing here?
Maybe it was possible to implement the icons from SmartVisu to OpenHab?
Is there a weekly calender for switching? Something like the outdoor light should turn on at 22.00 an off Again at 6.00?
Is it easy to implement new “bindings”? If i wanna implement my alarm system with an external software that is written in Java also?
Which version of OH are you looking at? For OH1 there is the classic UI and a handful of third party UIs that work with OH natively. OH2 has Basic and Paper, though I think Paper is an administration UI.
Either OH version has a REST API and supports MQTT which many people have used to integrate with OH including OpenRemote. Search the forum for “User Interface”, “UI”, or “Panel” and you should find some of the many threads where people are showing and discussing the many UIs they have created or integrated with.
Personally I’m of the opinion that if you need a UI for your HA to work it is a poor HA design so I haven’t spent any real time looking into alternatives.
I can mainly speak for OH 1. Bringing in alternative and additional icons is as trivial as dropping them into the webapps/images folder as .png and following the naming convention (i.e. if you have icons for switches for both the ON and OFF states you would name it with the state the icon represents such as switch-on.png and switch-off.png).
There is a binding that integrates with Google Calendar. Natively it supports rules that trigger using cron syntax. For example if you want a light to come on at 22.00 you would have a rule with Time cron "0 0 22 * * ? *" that turns the light on and a rule that triggers with Time cron "0 0 6 * * ? *" that turns the light off. The full cron syntax is supported so you can set it up by day of the week, day of the month, day of the year, and any combination of things you can do with cron.
In addition there is the Astro binding which lets you get times for and trigger rules based on things like actual sunrise, actual sunset, phases of the moon, astrological sign, etc.
If your alarm system has a simple HTTP or TCP/UDP API or supports one of the 130+ already supported protocols it is far better to use the existing bindings than to create a new binding. If you already have command line scripts and programs you can use to interact the Exec binding is a good place to start.
If it not or it requires special work to authenticate (e.g. uses Oauth like the Nest API) a new binding may be warranted. Creating a new binding is well documented here though I would search around on this forum for threads discussing creating a new binding for OH 2 as it is probably not worth the time to develop a new binding for OH 1 at this point.
I was thinkink on getting the OH2 - since i’m gonna start from scratch - then i think it will be stupid to start with something “old” - but as i can read it is possible to migrate from version 1 to 2…?
Actually yesterday i’ve searched around, i’ve found the HABmin2 - which seems pretty awesome - but i can’t decide whetever it’s for Visualizing, or for configuration the OH2 - i think it can be used for both?
I have some iPad’s wall mounted around my house - where i would like a pretty UI (Smartvisu had that - but laggy in other points)
OK then it should be pretty “easy”
When using the Crontab function, will you then be able to set the on/off times and days from the UI and then they are updated? (In Smarthome.py it was nessecary to restart when changing crontab values)
I was looking for something like:
Yes you can migrate. And most if not all of what you learn setting up OH 1 will be applicable to OH 2 so it wouldn’t be a waste of time starting with OH 1, even with the end of life of OH 1.x rapidly approaching.
I think it can be used for both but I think it is primarily intended as an administration UI. Habmin is indispensable for configuring zwave devices but I haven’t tried to use it for much else. The developer does not recommend using Habmin2 with OH 1.x so I’ve not looked that extensively into what it can do beyond zwave config.
There was a guy who posted about an iOS app that he is writing that looked pretty nice. He has no plans to support web or android so it was a non-starter for me but it might work for you.
If you use Habmin to write your rules then yes. But one thing you should realize is that openHAB does not have a nice GUI (beyond Habmin) for writing rules. You will have to get your hands dirty and actually write out the code. There is an IDE available which makes rules development easier and tons and tons of examples. But to get the behavior you are displaying above you will need to write (more likely copy an example) code to implement the gradual increase in the dimmer.
Habmin supports a graphical programming language similar to Scratch (or many of the similar environments that stole also reuse the idea of scratch like Legos Mindstorms and Google’s App Inventor) where you build the rules programs graphically, but it is still programming.
Products like Smarthome create a much simpler graphical interface for programming the automation behavior but do so at the cost of capability and flexibility. With OH I can literally do anything. With something like Smarthome I can only do what the developers feel fit to allow me to do, but let me do it in a much simpler way.
But for the record, the behavior you have above could be implemented (there is more than one way) with a rule like the following:
rule "Wohnzimmer Rollo"
when
Time cron "0 45 7 * * ? *"
then
WohnzimmerRollo.sendCommand(20)
Thread::sleep(180000)
WohnzimmerRollo.sendCommand(50)
Thread::sleep(120000)
WohnzimmerRollo.sendCommand(0)
end
Point taken - i will start with OH1 then and see when OH2 is available
I’ve found some iPad apps that can do this - but then you “design” the UI at the iPad, and not centrally, meaning you have to do that everywhere…
I don’t mind “Getting my hands Dirty” with the code - actually that’s what i like, so i wouldn’t prefer the Graphical designer
I must search around for something
I understand, also what i’m a bit confused about regarding the SmartHome, since many functions isn’t available. That’s a bit why i’m looking at OH instead… Just need to find the perfect GUI
