Stability of myopenhab & google home for everyday use

If you (and others) are willing to pay for an improved experience, then perhaps rather than make multi-tiered, paid access levels (and add to the maintainers’ already heavy load), we should all consider donating to the project, or even joining the openHAB foundation for a more regular financial support. I bet if more users did this, the maintainers would be able to scale up the service, and benefit everyone.

Its a good idea… However, joining the foundation is not a simple and easy task in my opinion. It actually require something most people wouldnt normally accept. And it´s really sad cause I believe alot of people would donate if it could be done in a more suitable way.

Another option is to host your cloud yourself. I think there is a guide somewhere here in the community to do so. But it wont do much good, if the internet connection is the reason to blame. The cloud still need a stable connection.

the google home action is not supported with a self hosted cloud. so if you want your google home to control devices managed by OH, you are forced to take the official openhab-cloud. Writing your own google action is not a real alternative.

HI - I’m new here. I’ve been using Openhab2 for a few months now. Thanks to all for the great work on this project.

I have been experiencing the same concerns in this thread. I can live with the few seconds delay sometimes when asking Google Home to turn something on or off, but the “can’t reach Openhab” thing is a bit more of a problem.

My take on this is it is not a problem with my Openhab setup or my ISP Internet connection. The reason I say this is because Google will take 10 or 15 seconds and say it can’t reach openhab, but then the action I requested will still happen, maybe many seconds later. This indicates to me that Google is timing out waiting for Openhab to acknowledge the request (Google will wait 5 seconds, this I know because I have written Google actions). However, Openhab has obviously received the request and executes it it since it eventually works which indicates latency in the pipeline, rather than broken connectivity issues.

I also see fairly frequent connection drops and reconnects with the cloud service in my Openhab personal server logs. These usually last 30 seconds to a couple minutes. They don’t correspond to any known internet connectivity issues in my house (1GB FIOS connection). They also don’t seem to correspond to times where I’ve had the “can’t reach Openhab” issue.

I moved from HCA to Openhab2 to get more devices supported since I am moving off of X10. I never had this latency problem with HCA, the response from Google requests was always pretty much instant. The only difference in configuration was that HCA was running on my same home server but using HCA’s cloud rather than Openhab’s.

I understand this isn’t a “support forum”. However, we are using a service, and if we rely on it to control our home we need a way to get “support”. I don’t know what that means. I would be very willing to pay $ for the service to be able to get support, or at least ensure that the service is being supported. I would also be willing to contribute my time to help the implementation of the cloud service.

I’d like to do more than just shrug about this. I’ve been doing some cool things with Openhab I’m getting ready to contribute to the community, but if I can’t get a reliable operation I can encourage my wife to use I am going to be forced to move my development and implementation efforts and time to another platform.

Yes, I’m seeing this as well - not every day, but maybe once every second week I get google reporting that it could not reach openhab right now. Sometimes the command still works. My internet connection is not something I’d consider be part of this problem, since I never have issues anywhere else (1Gbit fiber, and high throughputs, and I’m in Europe). My assumption is the workload of the oh cloud servers time to time is casuing this. But I have no clue if this is the true cause though. Most times, the google commands are surprisingly quick. Also I would not mind paying a fee if it helps.

so, it’s Aloha to Openhab. I really liked the project but the cloud and voice control are just too unstable. This thread got no responses beyond the snarky “this ain’t a support forum”. Gotta have something reliable so I’ve migrated to HASS and that seems Great. Worth 5 bucks a month to me.i’ll bring my development efforts there, including my Tuya service I wrote.

bob

Sorry to hear that you didn’t get any responses. I wasn’t a member of the community in January, but I would have tried to help if you had bumped the thread more recently. Others who missed seeing it the first time around might have also chimed in.

I also get disconnects from myopenhab in my log and I’ve seen it discussed in a few threads, but Google Home has never been particularly slow to respond for me.

I agree that it’s probably better for you to pay for HASS, and I hope it comes with the features, stability, and support you need. I’m sure your development efforts would have been appreciated and encouraged if you had discussed them in the OH community, but I guess we’ll never know. You’re always welcome back if you change your mind, though.

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I recommend using openhab cloud privately. I run it on the same server as my oh2 instance. It’s a pain to setup (or can be) but it’s been rock solid since install. Nothing against the myopenhab but prefer the control locally.

Thanks for the feedback, but what else do you need to consider before making that change? I have looked and I remember I saw you need to pay a monthly fee for a certificate of some kind? oauth2 or SSL? Any free ways to get it running locally?

There has been several other threads about the issue in quite some time. This could be the reason why this specific thread hasn´t been answered.

I use myopenhab/google home almost daily. My experiences is, that its fairly stable. There are a few hickups now and then, but mostly its running just fine. When there are hickups, I´ll just repeate the command, and then it works.
Granted, I would love it to be rock solid ofcouse. But I think this feature is having several places where it can go wrong, beside openhab, so I dont think it´ll ever been rock solid like in 100% perfect. I would assume the very same for HASS and any other system using google home/assistant voice commands.

Good luck to you!

Matt, there are no fees. Lets Encrypt SSL Certs are free, just setup a crontab to renew them every 30 days. Works well.

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Thanks will have to add it to the long list of TODO’s. The job is a long way down the list as it is working for me now I worked around a network issue that my ISP had/has. I am also more keen to throw away the google home and move to the Habot so things keep working when the internet goes down and it is a fully local solution that does not sell my data. Sadly not enough time to look at all the cool things that can be done :slight_smile:

If anyone needs help running Oh2 cloud locally, let me know

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Is there a nice howto or something? Cause I am very interested in creating my own cloud.

Hi
Is there a guide or general guidance for setting up open have cloud local?

Ill post up my notes a bit later

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I set this up recently. Tbh - I found the easiest way was to use docker.

  1. I ran a Traefik container, which does http/s proxying, including all the Let’s Encrypt certs. Follow this HOWTO and then forward your 80 & 443 ports from your router to the docker host.

  2. I then created a My OpenHab service based on the official docker docs. It didn’t work out of the box, so I modified the dockercompose.yml as follows:

version: '2'
services:
    app-1:
        container_name: app-1
        image: docker.io/openhab/openhabcloud-app
        working_dir: /opt/openhabcloud
        volumes:
        - /your/persistent/path/config.json:/opt/openhabcloud/config.json
        networks:
        - internet
        - ohcloud-network
        links:
        - mongodb
        - redis
        ports:
        - "3000"
        depends_on:
        - mongodb
        - redis  
        restart: always
        labels:
        - "traefik.docker.network=internet"
        - "traefik.enable=true"
        - "traefik.frontend.rule=Host:your.domainname.com"
        - "traefik.port=3000"
        - "traefik.protocol=http"
    mongodb:
        container_name: mongodb
        image: mongo:4.1.10-bionic
        ports:
        - "27017"
        networks:
        - ohcloud-network
        volumes:
        - /your/persistent/path:/data/db
        restart: always
    redis:
        container_name: redis
        image: bitnami/redis:latest
        networks:
        - ohcloud-network
        ports:
        - "6379"
        environment:
        - REDIS_PASSWORD=123_openHAB
        restart: always
networks:
  internet:
    external:
      name: internet
  ohcloud-network:
    driver: bridge
  1. I don’t have a permanent IP, but I do have a DNS service that supports dynamic DNS, so I run another container that regularly updates my domain name. Job done!

If you’ve not used docker before, it might be a bit of a leap. But if you have, it’s the easiest way to go IMO.

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That all said, it seems like the OpenHAB/Google Home connection only supports myopenhab.org, not self hosted myopenhab, which is a shame… Who maintains that? Could we get it changed?

I don’t think Google allows that. If you want to connect it to your self hosted instance you will have to create your own Google Action with dev access. See the Google Action thread.

Yes, this is what I ended up doing. Works pretty well :slight_smile: