What is the current state of RFXCOM?

With OH1 I had everything working reliably, multiple cheap PIRS, LightwaveRF dimmers, thermometers, wireless wall switches, a remote (LightwaveRF) and several power sockets.

After a recent house move I finally took the plunge with OH2 and used it to set up the new system. Which in itself was quite a challenge.

All my RFXCOM stuff has been pretty unreliable. I am not sure how much the new house is to blame, it could be OH2, RFX or devices I am trying to use.

There is so much conflicting and confusing information about the RFXCOM binding for OH2 scattered all over the place. There are multiple threads on the forums that span years, and you have to read the whole thing just in case there is a snippet of key information in a post that was written as part of a conversation started in 2015 that relates to your current issue :slight_smile:

Then you have the official docs which do try to tackle the problem but they make a lot of assumptions. There are many threads within issues and pull requests on GitHub for the openHAB repo, full of useful and sometimes critical information based on input from the developers.

All these sources reference each other constantly, sometimes SmartHome is discussed (and I confess, I have been using openHAB for 3+ years and I still really know what SmartHome and how it relates to openHAB) ultimately I find myself going in circles.

Anyhoo, despite all the challenges that come with openHAB, a couple of weeks back, I seems to find the sweet spot and all my RFX stuff was working. Yay.

A couple of days ago I updated openHAB2 (apt-get snapshot) and now nothing works.

This post is not me asking for help trying to fix it again, it is not the first time this has happened and I usually find and fix the problem after a few evenings reading all the stuff I have read many times before :wink:

It is asking if there is a light at the end of the tunnel? What is the current state of the binding? Do the other home automation systems that use RFXCOM have similar issues? Is it a Java thing?

Things seems to only be getting worse, the good intentions in making OH2 more “approachable” with auto discovery and PaperUI has been lost (if anything it makes configuring even more complicated).

I appreciate that the project is open source and all the work that goes into developing it and the excellent community that supports each other. But some days (and nights) when I am having diagnose and fix the hallway lights for the 30th time, it all feels a little… hopeless :confounded:

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I am really sorry to hear this, I worked on some recent contributions for rfxcom in openHAB, however I am only aware of a small number of problems. One is the limited support for lighting4 which only recently was improved.

Another problem of which I know that in the last stable we unfortunately have a regression which broke support for using your rfxcom over the network see also:

In my home situation my rfxcom is stable.

I use the paper ui to setup the things and configure the items manually this works very well, in the rare case where I have too reconfigure things or move/replace devices I just replace the thing-UUID in the items file.

I don’t know how other users think about the stability of rfxcom but to resolve specific problems please let me know the exacts problem (versions, configuration, debug logging), you can also create an issue or multiple if you have separate problems in the GitHub openHAB 2 tracker.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about this!

Thanks Martin. I guess it is part of the risk I take using the snapshot build.

Last week my RFX stuff stopped working (again) not sure if it is an openHAB thing or RFX or the PIRs (because it still sends out the signal to my LightwaveRF sockets).

Anyhoo… it stopped working so I apt-get updated/upgraded and when asked should I replace certain config files I said no (as this was the default) then nothing worked, openHAB wouldn’t run, I think it had something to do with a change in the way the logs are written as this post (which of course I only read after I updated) Karaf Upgrade says I was supposed to say Yes when asked if the config file should be overwritten.

Granted this has nothing to RFX or your binding, it just another openHAB quirk, I was unable to restore from a backup, or revert back to the old version or get to a point where I could say “yes overwrite the file”

So, once again, i had to start all over again, this time I am just using the stable build as I really am fed up with spending days without openHAB working as I don’t have to time to find out what went wrong.

Hopefully this will mean things won’t just stop working because I run an update on the machine running openHAB.

Fingers crossed :slight_smile: