my name’s Jennifer and I’m about to start my first project in home automatisation. About a year ago I bought sensors, thermostats and the home control from Devolo, as well as sensors from D-Link and their my dlink connected home hub. As some of the components aren’t making completely use of their capabilities and the software from devolo leaves room for improvement I started reading about other possibilities and I came across OH.
My targets aren’t set so high, for the beginning. I mainly want a higher frequency of information exchange between home control and thermostats / sensors, sensors to actively check temperature and for movement…
When the basic things run, I normally have no problems with the programming part. But to get there I have some really basic questions and hope you can help me:
Do I have to use a raspberry pi to run OH? Or can I program everything on my Mac and then somehow transfer this on the home control station and from then this runs as programmed?
I’m not really sure that I have understand what you are aiming to do.
What do you mean by that? Have you kept your Devolo home control gateway and now want to use this piece of hardware to run OH on it? Well, I think this will not work.
OpenHAB is an Java based environment, so basically every device capable of running Java (preferable Oracle Java) can run OpenHAB. So you can run your OpenHAB on Macs, on Windows machines, on Linux or whatever. As a raspberry is a tiny device with low energy consumption and it can run Linux, it’s the preferred solution for many here, because a home automation system has to run 24/7.
So: You can run your OH on a raspberry, but you can access your raspberry (to make updates, to change your configuration, to edit the sitemap or whatever) with your MAC. That’s for example exactly what I do.
I also started with the devolo home control and I was so unsatisfied that I sent it back to Amazon. I kept a few of the sensors (floor sensor and humidity sensor) and I ordered a zwave usb stick from Aeotec. I still didn’t receive it, but once I tried it out, I will post my experience.
As per my knowledge the only way to partially integrate the Devolo home control is via the scene sharing option. Meaning that you can send an off or on command with via http to the actor. But in this way communication only works one way, which is from the devolo home control to the actor. So you can switch and actor on or off but you can not get information about power consumption etc back to openhab.
