The need for simplification

Hardware Home Automation
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1

Hello,
This is the setup of my homeautomation:

  • PLC with lots of DIO’s for pushbuttons and switches (old part of the initial system)
  • Openhab server
  • Hue hub with lamps, Gledopto dimmers and Icasa dimmers
  • Some other devices like kodi, Onkyo, …

The PLC have the logic, controls the scenes, lighting, heating etc.
Openhab is used for the remote control, is communicating with the PLC by modbus and is used as a many protocols to modbus translator.

As it is a rather complex setup I was thinking to simplify it, right now between the push of a button and the turning on of a light, there are a number of devices in between: the PLC, the openhab server, the Hue hub.

Ideal should be connecting all the buttons directly to the openhab server and controlling the zigbee devices without the Hue hub, but I have no idea how to accomplish this.
What hardware should I look out for?

2

You need a USB Zigbee coordinator. See the docs for the Zigbee binding for more on which coordinators are compatible with OH.

3

thank you for the responce.
what is the most recommend USB Zigbee coordinator?

4

The developer recommends a controller with an Ember chipset. All three compatible ones are listed in the docs I linked to above.

5

Since the topic start, I have ordered a Deconz USB Dongle.
Great piece of kit, however not was I expected.
It is not a stand alone device.

6

The bit we’ve missed is, how are these buttons connected now?
I’m guessing wired to the PLC.

Some openHAB hosts like Pi will offer GPIO pins, but might be limited for a lot of remote buttons.
There aren’t a lot of good home market products for “many pushbuttons” interfacing.
I use “dumb” Modbus DIO modules for this myself.
But frankly you might just as well stick with the PLC and have openHAB continue to read its inputs, even if you move the control rules to OH.

7

Did you get it working on openhabian? I’m starting to tear my hair out on that one…

8

Correct, IO’s are connected to the plc. AI’s also.
Right now, all the logic happens in the plc althoug some rules are needed to translate modbus to hue.
If I only could control the Hue’s from the plc.
The Deconz dongle is great, but not good for my setup as it needed a lot of sw to communicate with.

9

Openhab is running on openhabian great.
The Deconz sw does not work under openhabian so I created a debian system.

10

Nah. I happily run it myself on latest openHABian.

11

I gave up. I could get it running but then the openhab interface failed. And when I disabled it the OH interface came back alive. It’snow again connected to my synology through docker. However I still would like to bring all together on my oh box…

12

deCONZ/phoscon starts a web server on standard port 80. If you use that port for OH or nginx or anything else already it won’t work. Here’s where you can change the port:

openhabian@devpi:~ $ cat /lib/systemd/system/deconz.service
[Unit]
Description=deCONZ: ZigBee gateway -- REST API
Wants=deconz-init.service deconz-update.service
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Service]
User=1000
ExecStart=/usr/bin/deCONZ -platform minimal --http-port=80
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=30
AmbientCapabilities=CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE CAP_KILL CAP_SYS_BOOT CAP_SYS_TIME

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target