For Sunday, October 21, 2018, the openHAB Foundation had invited to the SmartHomeDay in Ludwigsburg. The SmartHomeDay was hosted for the second time and is timed before the EclipseCon Europe, which takes place at the same location.
The openHAB community has grown significantly in recent years. Nevertheless, it still feels like a class reunion every time. There were about 100 people registered. Accordingly, everyone quickly got into conversation with each other and could recognize faces behind commit messages and forum posts.
Welcome ceremony
Three thematic blocks
The presentation program was divided into three thematic blocks. In the morning, the highlights of the developments of the last 12 months were presented.
Here I recommend the presentation of David Gräff, who has reworked the MQTT binding over several months and incidentally "donated" an embedded MQTT server to openHAB. He talks about his experiences as a developer from outside, who had to deal with the openHAB community and got to know the pitfalls in the development workflow. Kudos to him for his accomplishment and many thanks for his dedication. The result brings openHAB a much easier commissioning. (Unfortunately, in the video, the audio track is not recorded very well in the first few minutes. From 6:45 on, however, it can be understood well).
MQTT Integration for Eclipse SmartHome
Practical applications
The time after lunch belonged to the practice. It is always nice to see how people do things with openHAB. I had to smile at the "Attention hints" from Christina Zenzes & Anna Backs from codecentric AG. They also encountered the typical problem of namespaces. But it is also not easy to find a resilient concept for sensors and actuators.
Building Automation at codecentric Headquarters - A Look Behind the Scenes
The magician Yannick Schaus, who already gave us a glimpse of his developments in 2017, went one better this time. He has developed an openHAB chatbot with the help of OpenNLP. Great, Yannick. Thanks for that.
Admittedly, I still have a hard time with the idea of being able to chat with our office or my apartment. But I'm sure I'll find some useful applications for it. See for yourself.
HABot - A Chat Bot for openHAB
Sensitivities from the toolchain
The afternoon was a bit tough for me as a non-developer. A few representatives from the openHAB developer community presented toolchains and tools to each other in order to convince Kai Kreuzer on a subsequent panel that changes should be made to the toolchain. A spontaneous non-representative poll on which of the three options the audience present would like to see came up with a tie between the approaches. So "No updates!" as George Erhan mentioned in his presentation?
But the core of the debate is exciting. OSS communities are also always about young talent. Who wants to "play around" with software that looks outdated because it doesn't use modern toolchains? And until the community has explained why good concepts don't necessarily always have to pick up on the latest trends and implement them, those interested often prefer to keep up with the current "hot shit".
Panel Discussion - Build Tooling for Eclipse SmartHome
Exciting conversations
As always at conferences, however, it's all about the good conversations before and after the conference. Here, too, the openHAB community knows how to celebrate and is open to participants who were there for the first time.
From me a big thank you to the organizing team and the sponsors.
You can also get more impressions under the hashtag #SmartHomeDay on Twitter.
