openHAB can integrate Google Calendars. The functionality is kind of limited, it can only see the current and the next calendar event, but in my case that is enough. More about the use case in another blog post.
There are three different calendar bindings available, let's have a quick look:
- CalDAV Personal Binding: this is a v1 binding, which means it will no longer work in the soon-to-be-released openHAB v3. Apparently this works with Google calendars, but has performance issues. It can show the current and next event.
- Google Calendar Scheduler: also a v1 binding. Needs more work for presense simulation, and additional bindings.
- iCalendar Binding: v2 binding, should work with v3. It can show the current and next event. That's the one I'm going to use.
Continue reading "Add a Google Calendar to openHAB"
openHAB rules files are lazy loaded. When a rule is used the first time, the entire rule file is loaded and compiled, which apparently is single-threaded and takes a couple seconds. Even on a reasonable powerful Rasperry Pi 4. This happens both after restarting openHAB and after changing the rules file. It also means that whatever the rule in question is supposed to do has to wait a couple seconds when requested for the first time. Imagine you have a light switch, enter a room, press the switch, and it takes 5-10 seconds until the light comes on.
To work around this problem, I add a piece of code in all rules files which triggers an immediate action right after loading the file. This way the rules file is already pre-loaded (which again takes a couple seconds, but likely at a time when the rule is not needed right now).
Continue reading "openHAB: faster loading of rules files"
A while ago someone mentioned "reminders" used in their home audio system, and I took that idea and implemented something similar in openHAB.
The basic idea is that I can send scheduled notifications to any audio sink openHAB is using, possibly more than one audio sink for one message. Also I want to differentiate between a simple audio sound, and text output.
For the text audio output I installed Text-to-Speech a while ago, this enables the ability to output text as audio in different languages. In addition I want an information when a reminder is "fired" in my Telegram control channel. As audio sink I'm mostly using ChromeCasts here, but anything openHAB can connect to is usable here.
Continue reading "Audio reminders in openHAB"
