MQTT and openHAB adventure

Some people asked me to share my MQTT setup in regard to openHAB and I agreed to do so. In this blog post I will explain and describe in more detail my current setup primarily on the heating subject.

But first some background info. A long time ago I installed openHAB 1.6 on a Raspberry Pi 2 and started with some Homematic and Enocean (devkit) devices, but learned there were more interesting alternatives and fell in love with the MySensors project. This project allows you to create your own home automation devices with Arduino and alike hardware and provides a library that will handle all communication between the devices and openHAB. Since I started with MySensors I have used MQTT to connect to openHAB, so I already had a working MQTT setup when the OpenTherm gateway entered the house.

Setting up MQTT is pretty straightforward. Below I describe the steps I took to install and configure MQTT in combination with openHAB.

1. $ sudo apt-get install mosquitto
   This installs version 0.15 of the software from the default repository. In my recent journey to upgrade MySensors from 1.5 to 2.1 I had to upgrade the mosquitto software to a newer release to make it work again.
2. Upgrade mosquitto (optional)
   $ cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
   ** $ sudo wget http://repo.mosquitto.org/debian/mosquitto-wheezy.list**
   ** $ sudo apt-get update**
   ** $ sudo apt-get install mosquitto**
3. Start the moquitto service
   $ sudo service mosquitto start
4. Install MQTT openHAB binding (assuming openHAB is installed from the repo).
   $ sudo apt-get install openhab-addon-binding-mqtt
   otherwise place the MQTT addon binding in the right directory
5. Configure the openHAB MQTT binding
   edit the openHAB main config file: /etc/openhab/configurations/openhab.cfg
   mqtt:mybroker.url=tcp://localhost:1883
   ** mqtt:mybroker.clientId=openHAB**
6. Restart openHAB
   $ sudo service openhab restart
7. Check if the addon is loaded and reports an connection:
   $ sudo tailf /var/log/openhab/openhab.log | grep -i mqtt
   2016-11-06 16:40:29.047 [INFO ] [.io.transport.mqtt.MqttService] – MQTT Service initialization completed.
   2016-11-06 16:40:29.050 [INFO ] [o.i.t.m.i.MqttBrokerConnection] – Starting MQTT broker connection ‘mybroker’

Now that openHAB is configured to listen to the MQTT message bus it’s time to hook up the OpenTherm gateway.

I will continue in another post to explain the OpenTherm gateway configuration and openHAB items and rules. Also some useful debugging commands which I use alot. This was drafted pretty quickly, so the layout is not that nice. Hopefully I will find some time to tidy up the styling..

That’s it for now, more to follow on this subject soon!