Openhab Heating Configuration

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This tutorial is a section of my wider series on creating a home automation solution for heating and watering in my house.  Refer to the index here.

In this post I cover a detailed configuration of Openhab for heating purposes.  We create the rule sets to allow us to have an arbitrary number of zones, with each zone having 4 setpoints at configurable times during the day.  The zones push those setpoints down to the devices in the zone.  We allow people to change the temperature in a zone using the wall thermostat, but override again at the next timed change.

We also control the running of the boiler based on how many valves are open – this is to avoid the boiler short cycling when there are very few valves or valves only partly open.  We’ll cover this in more detail when we get to the relevant rules.

We create a sitemap that gives us access to most of this information.

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Configuration of MAXCUL and CUL Dongle

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This tutorial is a section of my wider series on creating a home automation solution for heating and watering in my house.  Refer to the index here.

In this post I cover the installation of the firmware for the CUL dongle (culfw), the programming of the dongle to work with your raspberry pi, and configuration of the maxcul binding for Openhab.

At the end of this tutorial you should have one wall thermostat and one radiator valve paired to your raspberry pi via the CUL dongle.

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Installing Openhab on Pi

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This tutorial is a section of my wider series on creating a home automation solution for heating and watering in my house.  Refer to the index here.

In this post we install a new Raspberry Pi from scratch, and get OpenHab running on it.  We choose to use Wifi, and we install it headless (no GUI and no monitor).  We install by connecting the card reader to a linux machine, which gives us access to the file system as we build it.

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Using Pi and OpenHab to control radiators and watering

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Our house has hydronic radiator heating, we also have a watering system and other equipment.  I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi to control the heating, as our radiators previously had manual valves.  I also wanted to control the garden watering system whilst I was at it.

This tutorial series will cover the process of installing and configuring the software to achieve this, with topics being:

 

Exporting playlists from mythmusic

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In my new house I don’t have any free to air TV – reception is too poor.  So my mythtv installation is less useful than it could be – it’s primarily a setup that records TV.  It also plays music, but it’s not inspiring at it.

My frontend died and needed replacing, and after fighting for a while I couldn’t get LIRC/remote controls going with the new hardware.  I looked around and Kodi (an evolution of XBMC) looks to have a really good remote app that goes on my iPhone.  Way better.

I’ve installed Kodi and it’s working well after some fiddling around.  But I had a lot of music playlists in mythtv.  I want them in Kodi.  Kodi can import standard m3u playlists, mythtv doesn’t have a standard export for them.

After googling around a bit, I decided to write a perl script that does it.  Without further ado, here it is for anyone that might need such a thing.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use DBI;

# MySQL database configuration
my $dsn = "DBI:mysql:mythconverg";
my $username = "root";
my $password = 'Massey01';

# path prefix - haven't dealt with storage groups, so set this to your storage group path
my $prefix = "/usr/share/mythtv/server/mp3/";

# connect to database
my $dbh  = DBI->connect($dsn,$username,$password);

# create temporary table for holding song list
my $sql = "CREATE temporary table tmp_playlist_songs (
  playlist_id int(11),
  playlist_name varchar(255),
  song_id int(11)
)";
my $create_table = $dbh->prepare($sql);

# create the table
$create_table->execute();
$create_table->finish();

# setup the insert statement ready for use
$sql = "INSERT INTO tmp_playlist_songs( playlist_id, playlist_name, song_id )
        VALUES (?,?,?)";

my $insert_stmt = $dbh->prepare($sql);

# select all playlists from the database
$sql = "SELECT playlist_id,
               playlist_name,
               playlist_songs
           FROM music_playlists";
my $get_playlists = $dbh->prepare($sql);
# execute the query
$get_playlists->execute();

my $playlist_id;
my $playlist_name;
my $playlist_songs;

# iterate over each playlist
while( my @row = $get_playlists->fetchrow_array() ) {
  $playlist_id = $row[0];
  $playlist_name = $row[1];
  $playlist_songs = $row[2];

  my @songs = split( ',', $playlist_songs );

  # insert the songs into the temporary table
  foreach my $song ( @songs ) {
    $insert_stmt->execute($playlist_id, $playlist_name, $song);
  }

  # select out the song filenames
  $sql = "SELECT path, filename FROM
            tmp_playlist_songs,
            music_songs,
            music_directories
          WHERE
            tmp_playlist_songs.song_id = music_songs.song_id AND
            music_songs.directory_id = music_directories.directory_id";
  my $get_playlist_detail = $dbh->prepare($sql);

  $get_playlist_detail->execute();

  open my $file_handle, ">$playlist_name.m3u";

  while( my @song_row = $get_playlist_detail->fetchrow_array() ) {
    print $file_handle $prefix . $song_row[0] . '/' . $song_row[1];
    print $file_handle "\n";
  }
  $get_playlist_detail->finish();

  close $file_handle;

  # clear out the temporary table
  $sql = "DELETE FROM tmp_playlist_songs";
  my $delete_playlist = $dbh->prepare($sql);
  $delete_playlist->execute();
}
$get_playlists->finish();
$insert_stmt->finish();

# disconnect from the MySQL database
$dbh->disconnect();

Hope it’s useful for someone.