Suggestion: Board for the presentation of own projects

[rlkoshak (Rich Koshak)]

Some quick responses now. A more lengthy response to follow when I have more time.

@imhofa

• naming scheme of items (not necessarily at the beginning with <10 items, but very useful for growing numbers of items without the need of renaming all items)

There is a good and comprehensive thread on this topic here.

Who has got some clever ideas for item naming schemes?

It has come time to re-write all my config as it has evolved into a bit of a mess over the last few years. I am trying to come up with a clever naming system for my various items, both physical bindings and virtual items. This needs to include group names etc as well. Just wondering what others are doing in terms of how they structure their item names etc? Any clever schemes in use which make your life a lot easier? I am also thinking about how to integrate other control systems, such as an Am…

@imhofa

• how to set up items and sitemap, related to presentation in the UserInterface (e.g. should the text be specified within the item or should this made within the sitemap?)

I don’t think there is a consensus on this. Personally I identify it in the Item. I see strong arguments either way and see no reason why one approach is fundamentally better than the other.

@imhofa

• do little steps within openhab

I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you mean show how to gradually build up a HA system bit by bit then I agree. OH 1 is sorely missing a user’s guide in English (apparently there is one in German). With OH 1 nearing end-of-support it really doesn’t make sense to write one for it now. One is planned for OH 2.

@Maximo

OH doesn’t have a built in function to allow you to know when Sunset or Sunrise is. You have to use a number of components to achieve this. For me when doing home automation this a very important piece of information and should be available directly. I still don’t have the right solution in place even though I have searched the forum to try and find one that works.

The Astro binding is the direct way to get sunrise and sunset times and/or events.

Astro binding

Here is how I use it and Time cron triggers to drive my time of day automation.

Automation/Orchestration Design Patterns

I’ve debated whether to continue this thread or to start a new one and decided to add to this thread. Ultimately this will probably be added to the wiki and/or included in the OH 2 user’s guide. So, it has been several months since I posted my design patterns above and as I’ve refactored things I’ve come up with some improvements which I will post here. Time of Day Design Pattern In the original above I use Switches to represent the current time of day state. This made sense at the time becaus…

@Maximo

Yes there is a fine balance but to just assume there is likely to be an overhead just because you’ve attempted to help others.

This is a sentence fragment but I think I understand the sentiment. I think you might be underestimating the amount of overhead that goes into posting your setup with the commentary to explain it in ways that are understandable to new comers. That post I linked to above took most of a day for me to write. A similar post also took around a day to write and comment. And you will notice that in both cases I’ve gone back to update them which has taken more time.

From this I would estimate it would take me a couple of man-weeks worth of effort to post my configuration with the same level of commentary and the post would run to many thousands of words. Personally, I think that time would be much better spent working on the OH 2 user’s guide (or maybe getting the documentation framework set up).

I’ll end with my usual comment. I’m not king around here. I’m often wrong. Nothing is stopping anyone from doing anything they see as helpful or useful.