Turn on light an hour after sunset

#1

Hi Everybody,

Trying to transition from ISY to OpenHAB. Facing many challenges.

I want to turn on a light an hour after sunset. I’ve installed Astro Binding v2.0. Created “Sun” and “Moon” things from the GUI. They got named as “astro:sun:local:rise#start” for example.

I then created two items to show the time in the GUI:
DateTime SunsetTime “Sunset [%1$tH:%1$tM]” (Astro) { channel=“astro:sun:local:set#start” }
DateTime SunriseTime “Sunrise [%1$tH:%1$tM]” (Astro) { channel=“astro:sun:local:rise#end” }

and added to the sitemap to see the values:

Frame label="Dates" {
    Text item=SunsetTime
    Text item=SunriseTime
}

But, could not see the values in the GUI. It complains about:
2017-04-09 05:40:21.917 [ERROR] [ui.internal.items.ItemUIRegistryImpl] - Cannot retrieve item 'SunsetTime' for widget org.eclipse.smarthome.model.sitemap.Text

Would appreciate help to see the time, and write a rule to turn on a light an hour after the sunset.

Thanks,
Ruben

#2

At first sight your syntax looks correct. Hmmmmmm…

#3

the error seems to imply OH does not “know” your items.
Has the items file been loaded correctly?(i.e. in openhab.log “Loading model ‘yourfile.items’”)
As for a rule, here an example rule that triggers when civil dusk ends. There are several “event”-type chanells that might suit your needs(e.g. sundown, civil dusk, nautical dusk…). Additionally you can set an offset from e.g. sunset as explained here:
http://docs.openhab.org/addons/bindings/astro/readme.html

rule "pitch black"
when
  Channel 'astro:sun:local:civilDusk#event' triggered END
then
	//do stuff when it gets really dark
end

HTH,
-OLI

#4

I had my items in a wrong file, which causes the weird behavior. Now I can read the sunset time.
But, how can I compare the time with sunset/sunrise offsets? Can I have a rule which would say something like this:

when
Date.Now is between [astro:sun:local:set + 1 hour, astro:sun:local:rise - 2 hours]
then
…

#5

You might be interested in this approach - switching an Item state by astro or time based events