In a more complex openHAB2 Rule I’m writing, I need to find out if a certain Item exist. If I try to access it when it does not exist, the Rule will fail. Not good.
I could pass in a parameter to the framework which builds the Rule, but that is cumbersome and requires changes on several places.
Let’s see if I can have the Rule figure this out.
There are a number of ChromeCasts in our setup. I’m adding (physical) switches to turn displays on and off, and primarily control the volume. When I turn the display off, I also want the ChromeCast to stop doing whatever it is doing right now (stop streaming), and go back to the default application (for video CC).
If openHAB has a Persistence service configured, the time of the last Item update (and a couple other times) is available in Rules. This makes it quite handy to check if a certain item hasn’t been updated in a long time. As example I have the Tankerkoenig Binding installed, and this data is persisted in InfluxDB. This way I can see historic gas prices in Grafana.
When the Telegram Bot answers the /tanken question, it appends the timestamp of the last gas prices update.
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.
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.
The openHAB rule system is not very helpful by pointing out when it’s missing something, or when there is an error to actually point to the problem.
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.
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).
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.
A while ago I integrated DWD warnings (Deutscher Wetterdienst) into our home automation system, and receive severe weather notifications ever since then. That works quite good, but it was missing a weblink with more details - or if you want to forward the warning to someone it would be useful to have a link to the warning as well. The DWD binding does not provide that piece of information, but it is easy enough to add - or so I thought.