Hi, thanks to the help of some folks in the forum I’m getting closer to understanding how to configure OH2, but I have some general questions that I’d like to validate before going down the wrong path.
The relationship between Things and Items? Can someone elaborate? I’m using the MIOS binding which seems to only work with items and not things? What are the limitations if I only focus on items and basically ignore things?
Based on what I’ve done so far I have some items (network items) that were created via discovery in the PaperUI and others created in a house.items file from the MIOS binding. So now some are in files and others are in persistence store. When I configure Eclipse SmartHome I only can see the items in the files right? Seems to be confusing to me, are there best practices that others have found around this?
Also, what “features” should I expect from Eclipse SmartHome, so far it just seems like a text editor. Am I missing something?
Welcome. I made a similar transition from Vera last year. From the Vera world Things equates to Devices and Items to the Control tab actions. I would strongly recommend reading through the OH docs http://docs.openhab.org/introduction.html to help root yourself.
The big change is that you are going to have to do your rules in text files (the equivalent of Lua scripting in Vera). There is an experimental rules generator in PaperUI and a basic Scratch-based graphical rules generator in HABmin which may be a good place to start. As you found the Eclipse Designer is mainly helpful for avoiding typos once you have the basics down.
I’ve read the introduction. However, what I haven’t figured out yet is with the MIOS binding I only have items created not things. Should I go through the trouble of figuring out how to create things out of my items?
Thanks, although I still have the follow up on how do I get the item IDs for the “things” that were created via the PaperUI discovery? Is there a way to force them into .items files so everything is in one place?
Easiest way is to add them manually from PaperUI (click the + sign next to the channel you want to create an item for), then you can decide which Channels you want to tie your items to and use a naming convention that works for you. That makes rules much easier when using a standard naming convention. You can also change the name of the items in the Mios generated text file as well.
