Thing4 is place where we share concepts around external addons and ideas which can be run within openHAB. We wish to exceed boundaries of origin project and push development of ecosystem forward.
This website is primarily made to share development tricks, ideas and concepts which may or may not fit openHAB. Because software frameworks come with certain constructions and assumptions, sometimes it is difficult to fit a new idea into them. This is true especially for openHAB which was invented as home automation system.
It happens that answer on openHAB forums is “it is a wrong idea” or “it does not fit”. These are often true statements, especially if openHAB was not designed to handle discussed use cases. More over, you could for example be given answer such “use pattern X”, “write a rule” or “store state as json”. In many cases you have been actually told that you have reached edge, a place where out-of-the box constructions available in openHAB do not help anymore.
Answers which mention rules, json or patterns show you how to achieve required functionality with mechanisms available in framework. We acknowledge these restrictions and know they come from existing constructions and earlier architectural design. Instead of making all this a dogma, here at Thing4 we wish to look, how to expand or introduce new mechanisms into framework which will lead to better handling of end user requirements.
Our intention is to speed up experiments and also development of software solutions which can benefit from these. What we describe and do here, at Thing4, is intended to be deployed in openHAB runtime. Prime goal of all this work is to make runtime flexible. While we honour low level assumptions made in openHAB core framework, we look above them, in order to expand available software functionality.
Innovation should bring fresh ideas, a new thing, new service, design or pattern. We hope that Thing4 will help you build more on top of openHAB and push its hard limits forward. At the same time, we assume that all results will remain experimental. This means that you deploy these at your own risk.
A quick summary of what this website is for:
- This website is made for advanced users and programmers. Everyone who would like to share new ideas and concepts which can be deployed on top of openHAB is welcome on our (tiny) community forums. This website nor its forum is not meant to provide a support or alternative of any kind for openHAB project itself.
- You can find and report here interesting ideas and concepts which make deployment of certain functionalities in smart home/manufacture/machine/building easier. We do not restrict openHAB core to home automation but treat it as a framework to build software solutions..
- Our forums are meant to be less restrictive in what software should do for you, or what you can offer to end users with that software.
All stuff you can see here is open-source. It is published through thingfour, a purely virtual GitHub organization. Both website and forums is not bound to any commercial entity (even if these may contribute to infrastructure, published materials and source code). There is no association nor formalized group of interest behind this.
Since this website and its forum is fresh, they might also disappear. A prime condition for such will be lack of publicity and widespread interest. Even if they will disappear, turning to be a temporary entity, a space dust within Internet, we believe it is still needed and will contribute to development of openHAB project and its ecosystem.
Initial sponsor of domain and hosting is Code-House, Łukasz Dywicki.