Month: January 2019

OpenHab Part 3: More Hue

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Finished getting all of my lights configured with OpenHAB, as well as configuring the sitemap.

Once I got the initial syntax down yesterday, the rest progressed very quickly.

What took most of the time, however, was getting my sitemap configured. Took me about 2 hours of comparing config files, and reading help files to realize that I hadn’t capitalized “switch” at one point in the config.

Oops.

Once I fixed that, the rest came together very quickly.

Next up, getting my smartthings connected. But that’s for tomorrow.

OpenHAB Part 2: Hue

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Since I already had a Hue bridge configured and setup with my lights, I decided to I’d start with integrating that into OpenHAB. I figured it would be relatively simple to do.

Well, that turned out to be rather optimistic.

Using the PaperUI, I was able to quickly identify the Hue Bridge. But, all attempts to connect kept failing. I checked the error message, and apparently I needed a username. No matter, I’m smart, I can Google things and get that information. Well, it sounded easy enough. There’s a hue API page (hueIP/debug/clip.html) where I was able to run the command (
{“devicetype”: “openhabHueBinding#openhab”} )to get the user ID. I had to press the button on the HUB, hit “Post” in the API page, and then got the User.

Thinking that that was all I needed to do, I copied the username to the PaperUI field, which is where I hit the next issue. PaperUI was insisting that I needed to do it via the .Items file. After finding the official openHab Hue page, I was able to generate the file and interact with the hub that way. Suddenly, all the connected lights popped up in the “Inbox” ready for configuration. As did 2 Hubs. Apparently, PaperUI only writes to the database, not the files, even though it pulls config from the files. At this point, I threw my hands up in the air, and abandoned PaperUI for config, and decided to do all the config from the files themselves.

This led to significantly more trial and error. At this point, I’ve got several things set up (lights and hub), as well as “items” for each of them (the actions that can take place).

My next step is get a sitemap up and running to interact with the lights. That’s tomorrow’s project.

OpenHAB on Raspberry Pi Part 1

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For Christmas, I got a Raspberry Pi 3 B. I’ve been wanting to set up a homegrown smarthome, and am planning on using this as a base for that. I’ll be running OpenHAB on the Raspbian OS.

I already have some smarthome equipment, including a SmartThings Hub, some HUE lights, and several Alexa’s. I’d prefer to run as much as I can inhouse, without relying on cloud services. Obviously, (and especially with the Alexa’s), that isn’t entirely possible, but I want to do as much as I can.

I’ve not spent much time with Linux, know nothing about Python, and my electrical/circuitry knowledge is what I can remember from a kids book of experiments from my childhood. This will very much be a learning experience for me, and should broaden my knowledge about those subjects a great deal.

As it stands now, I’ve got Raspbian running, OpenHAB deployed via Docker, and am ready to start configuring over the coming days. I’ve not used Docker before either, but it seems pretty cool.

Let’s see what the coming days bring!