The Need for Tutorials : I Thought I Was The Only One

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In addition to what @JustinG said, just realize that to do this as asked would require N! separate tutorials where N is going to be much greater than 350 (350! BTW is 123587405826548875014395199766546457224532073946919515879429330230093035357491314216934583295011178445941552109432761532449767761892237043444942213964090091669490545661255111334533069825455607852789836451585122902099649977304226794874840601811017764137584868137504975397325925882541777117706619490238363409254589994079334626893194608016888986949684994333459029365214555784862353939102567266745712846824819004146064184543888123533464975621179287075018586481357643313075153359002713294611632614208134036650116689052585573350955360246170451786972351365370405722036294385680478287278827977511411909071460914807681131728232182991517416470483157998067487290163200000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000). Why greater than 350? Because that’s just how many bindings there are. Each binding may require more than one tutorial and of course that doesn’t include Profiles, Transformations, and Rules.

I don’t think there is enough time between now and the heat death of the universe to write that many tutorials.

~That’s~ why the docs and many tutorials read like Unix man pages. We can’t write a cradle-to-grave tutorial for every combination of everything that everyone would want to use. But we can write a tutorial on “how to use the MQTT binding to do X”. Several in fact

When someone gets something working that was tricky to figure out, we encourage the posting of a tutorial in the tutorials and solutions category. It’s a great resource and the posters get the benefit of a review and revision (as @JustinG points out) and the community benefits as well.

MQTT is hard, especially if you don’t have a good understanding of the underlying technology (see Introducing the MQTT Protocol – MQTT Essentials: Part 1) and especially if you don’t understand your data flows. Based on that other thread, that was the source of your issues and no tutorial would help you with that. If you don’t understand the pub/sub topics you can’t ever get to a configuration that works, or if you stumble upon one you won’t understand it (which is what I suspect is the case here).

In short, the underlying technology may be such that a simple to understand tutorial isn’t feasible. I mean, we’ve given it about a dozen tries based on the list above and still haven’t managed to achieve a simple to understand tutorial involving MQTT.

Here’s the good news though. Once you are working in Items, it doesn’t matter that they are linked to MQTT. An Item is an Item whether it’s linked to MQTT, Zwave, HTTP, or any of the other 350 technologies and APIs OH supports.

So no, you won’t necessarily find a step by step showing how to link an Insteon Switch to an MQTT Switch (you could but you shouldn’t expect it), but you will find lots of docs and tutorials working with Items and how to define behaviors on Items. Causing something to happen on an Item (e.g. commanding) when an event occurs (e.g. a Switch changes state or is commanded) is a behavior. That’s what Rules and Profiles are for.

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