Recently I installed a number of new power sockets (like this one). The Hue bridge can not only add each switch to a light group, but also reports each plug as a Thing in openHAB. There I thought it will be a nice touch if openHAB actually reports when it sees a device plugged in. The power socket has a LED which turns on when the plug is on. The Hue bridge reports OFFLINE and ONLINE. That's useful.
The plan is to turn the LED light - and the power plug - on and off for a few second.
Continue reading "Online indicator for remote controllable power plugs in openHAB"
In one of my openHAB rules I'm using a timestamp to track when an Item went offline. This is used in my monitoring to let the user (me) know how long the Item is already offline.
Background: we have a couple ChromeCasts in our network. When they are connected to a 5GHz Wi-Fi they are quite unstable and often loose the network connection. Usually the openHAB binding reconnects the device quickly, but it happens that the device stays offline. It might have something to do with the router, but nevertheless I want to know when things go offline.
For this I defined a virtual Switch as DateTime:
DateTime LivingRoom_OfflineSince "Offline Since [%tY-%tm-%td%tH:%tM:%tS]"
When the ChromeCast goes offline, this Switch is updated in a rule with the current time:
LivingRoom_OfflineSince.postUpdate( new DateTimeType() )
However resetting the DateTime switch when the item comes back online proved to be a small challenge, the documentation is unclear. People write online about "UnDeftype", "UNDEF", "(unknown)", "UnDefType.UNDEF", "UnDefType.NULL" and a couple more.
In the end it's quite easy:
LivingRoom_OfflineSince.postUpdate(NULL)
Just update the Item with NULL. Don't use sendCommand() here, you only want to update the Item, not send a new command to a virtual switch.
