Hello efalken
I find the commitment of you and others here in the blog really praiseworthy, ** I’ve been using zigbee for about 2 years. The hole has now appeared after an update of raspberry (linux).
I installed OH3 yesterday to see how it behaves there.
The time behavior of deCONZ on the raspberry with OH3 is a little different, but the coupling and communication works very well right away.
I also find OH3 very appealing. It’s really forward-looking. Unfortunately, I cannot yet estimate how much effort it will take to create everything based on OH3 that I have on OH2.5 today. Have several users widget, rules and influxdDB. Grafana etc.
Therefore I will reinstall OH2.5 now to see if deCONZ runs like before.
This is going to be the case with any home automation system, even commercial systems. Home automation is hard, especially when you factor in the fact that a tool like openHAB bridges over 300 different technologies and closed gardens into one home automation environment.
And because openHAB is an open source product created and maintained by volunteers, the capabilities and maturity of each of those 300+ add-ons is not going to be even. Some will be rock solid and others will be less so.
But in general, if you don’t want to have to deal with system technology all the time, home automation in general is not for you.
To answer your specific question though, I’m exceptionally satisfied with openHAB. I’ve watched it grow for nearly seven years now from version 1.6 to 3.0. I’m satisfied enough that I donate to the foundation and donate my time to support the project on the forum and elsewhere. But I also have reasonable expectations for what it takes to even have basic capabilities in this problem space.
You don’t have to recreate everything. There are some breaking changes that you’ll have to adjust to, mostly in rules, but for the most part you can continue on as you have in OH 2.5 without change to your approach or config. Then you can gradually as you want move some stuff to new ways of configuring them, if you want to.
The bottom line is that openHAB should not be viewed as a consumer-focused product. For this reason, I don’t recommend it to other people. I tell them about it and what I like/dislike, then let them decide whether or not they want the experience/education/hassle.
Complex home automation is a DIY hobby, and there are much better (but less flexible) alternatives for people who want or need something that’s easy to use.
BTW, I’m very satisfied with OH as a hobby, and a good chunk of that hobby is hanging out in this community. If I just wanted to synchronize/schedule my lights, I’d probably hate it for being too complicated.
Found the learning curve very steep. Now have a smooth running system for the last 1.5 years.
1 time lost everything during an upgrade. Upgrade to 2.5.11 with smooth without issues.
But it did cost a lot of time to get things up and running. Especially the rules require a ton of google to get right and debugging the log files. Should have switched to HabApp right away to have a “IDE” environment to code. But I didnt know that. Documentation seem to be written by software engineers for software engineers.
For this reason, I don’t recommend it to other people. I tell them about it and what I like/dislike, then let them decide whether or not they want the experience/education/hassle.
100% my case.
(But what I have running is quite impressive though).
My 2 best friend run Domoticz. I know they encounter diffirent (but yet similar complex) issues, although they were up and running faster, I guess I can do the same or more than they can.
Home domotica in general is complex due to all different systems, protocols, modules, technologies. The main challenge lies there. And how to have a backup system in case of failures.
But, for sure going to OpenHab 3 once it is very stable (and I have sufficient time to get it right the first time). A house where the lights do not work right, leads to significant discussions with the wife, so I will only transition to version 3 once it is very stable and quick to get running the basics.
Hello and good afternoon
After a few days ago I obviously only described part of my opinion or experience in my post, I would like to share an extension of my statement with you.
Basically, I’m excited about OH2.5. Before I decided to use OH, I looked at several solutions (ioBroker, FHEM, etc.) and I am still very satisfied with my decision. Over the past two years I’ve learned about the possibilities of OH. The functionality of influxDB with Grafana, user widget and rules offer a variety of options in addition to the bindings.
But a punk to my disappointment on the weekend. I ended all running processes and carried out an update in accordance with regulations. Then restarted. And found that the ZigBee communication was no longer running. This has been (almost) unremarkable for about 2 years. I was able to fix the limitation with a complete reinstallation. Loading a backup would probably not have been used because an update would have led to the error again.
But enough of that, here’s the positive experience. I put both OH2.5 and OH3.0 back on after the kickback. (I always install the desktop components too so that I can use e.g. Python)
Both versions run cleanly. My ConBee II / Phoscon behaves a little differently when it starts up than before, but I can live with that.
The OH3.0 version is really trend-setting. Congratulations. In the medium term, I’ll switch.
To give you a feeling of what I am using, I am showing my sketch of the system environment that I created for myself to keep track of things.OH_Konfig.pdf (131.6 KB)
To answer the question in the headline:
I am absolutely satisfied with openhab. Of course it´s no plug and play solution, but nobody tells so. OH 2.4 runs absolutely stable since I set it up. Now I’m migrating to OH3 (With a completely new install) and I am impressed about all the possibilities it brings FOR FREE.
Before I made the decision to migrate to OH 3 I tried out HomeAssistant. Its very more plug an play - like at the first sight. Finally with a view to my different systems (Homematic, Zigbee, Sonoff) I discovered HA as more comlicated and less flexible than OH. So still my first choice is OH.
As I like to understand what´s happening in my home OH is the right decision too, even if it´s neccessary to learn every time i change something. Mabe that´s difficult sometimes - but for me it´s fun
Nice Greetings from Northern Germany
Also I, I’m completely satisfied. :+ I think it’s a matter of expectation.
As many other have stated, OH was and is not a plug&play solution. If you would like to have such a easy solution, you have to choose and stick to one supplier.
I am amazed from the huge possibilities to connect everything with OH and to configure everything to my needs. For sure, it’s time consuming. And there is a lot to learn. But that exactly the same for all hobbies. Regardless if you build plane models, create a train landscapes, brew the best beer or play with homeautomation, all of them require that you dedicate your time and efforts to it.
A hobby, that’s what I would call it. Because it’s not essential to my life. To be honest, I can switch off and on my lights also manually. It’s just cool and amazing if I can do automatically or via voice control. If someone asks why I did it and if it’s required, I say “Because I CAN”
Very satisfied. I have been running OH1 then OH2 for a few years. It is exceedingly stable and reliable. Since moving to OH2 it never required a reboot yet in 6 months, except when upgrading. One update broke it but it was easy to fix by clearing the caches.
It runs 58 devices in my house, using a mixture of ZWave, Hue/Zigbee and RFXCom, with the primary UI exposed to HomeKit and Siri. Good number of rules running automation.
However, it does require a fair amount of technical skills to get there, but once you have it set-up it does not break over time. It is most definitely not plug-and-play and it is not suitable for a non-techie user in my opinion. Not yet and probably not for another 5 years—all home tech is still nascent.
Hello yes in fact you need the technical experience (which I definitely have).
I’ll show you my seats from my system what I’ve done for myself so that I can talk about it better. Please read my post from above what I wrote four days ago
I recently helped my electrician with a commercial KNX server for visualizing stuff and for mobile control.
You cannot do stuff like even email sending on events with this 1200 Euro device. Or watching time series data (in a proper way), or switching something on and off on specific times…
It is as with a car: You need to learn how to drive it. In this example the commercial KNX server is a public transport bus with dedicated routes.
I forgot: Completely satisfied, I even thought of showing electricians an alternative to commercial KNX servers. Problem: They need to learn how to drive it
