[quote=“Kmitchel, post:5, topic:193513”]Thanks RHINESEL!
Is it a Binding to create rules? I’ve tried to search OpenHAB and Google for creating rules, but I can’t find a good tutorial/walkthrough. Do you have any suggestions?
Thanks in advance![/quote]
Sorry for the late reply, I’m spending less time here now that I’m moving most of my stuff off Vera (leaving only Locks and thermostats until security class and a solid radio thermostat binding is created).
Bindings have nothing to do with rules.
How OpenHab is envisioned is that a OH system is a stand alone system. It is simply a brain. People “attach” other items to the OH system. Say for example, you want to use an LG TV. A person (remember, opensource… no manufacturer) created the LG TV binding to allow OH to connect to the television. Vera has it’s own binding. A binding is a way for OH to communicate with the device of your choice. Think of them as “plug-ins” for Vera.
As for learning rules… there is no easy process (though the basics isn’t that hard. They pretty much follow a “When… Then…” formula. It’s just the formatting of the command you need to learn. There is a sample rules page [url=https://github.com/openhab/openhab/wiki/Samples-Rules]https://github.com/openhab/openhab/wiki/Samples-Rules[/url] but I found most of these are more advanced rules than basic. I found that simply visiting the forum and reading the posts in the rules sections taught me a lot.
What I did is create a “test” rules file. I started very easy. My first rule was when I turn on one outlet, a second would also turn on. Once I figured that out it was easy to expand upon that. Turn on a switch, also turn on an outlet. Make one outlet match the state of another outlet. These are all very similar. Next was adding a time component (took a few minutes to understand CRON). When XXXXXX… turn on XXXXX. This led me to using the Astro binding (a binding to calculate sun and moon positions) so I could integrate sunset/sunrise into my rules.
The tl:dr version is… start small. Do something very basic and then it’s easy to expand upon that. If you ever have questions, the people over at OH forums are great with newbies. My username there is the same as here so feel free to ask anything you need. I’m still a beginner myself, but we can figure it out together.
Last thing… if you’re relatively new to Linux and programming in general… it takes time. While I have some problems with Vera itself as a company, setting up OH has given me more respect for the people who created Vera (and other “commercial” systems). Granted, they can probably do in 10 minutes what it takes hours for me to do.