Trying to make python work for OpenHabian rules…

Notes

• Used the openhabian cli to install HabAPP.
• The service didn’t start: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘pydantic’
• I knew I would need curl so…

pip3 install pydantic
sudo systemctl start habapp.service
sudo systemctl status habapp.service

The service still didn’t start. Is HabAPP running in a venv?

pip3 remove pydantic

I determined from the HabAPP documentation that it might run in a venv

openhabian@openhabian:/opt/habapp $ source ./bin/activate
pip3 install pydantic
sudo systemctl start habapp.service
sudo systemctl status habapp.service

Status now said I was missing a different module, EasyCo, and on I went installing and testing…

pip3 install EasyCo
pip3 install eascheduler
pip3 install stackprinter
pip3 install watchdog
pip3 install paho-mqtt
pip3 install aiohttp
pip3 install aiohttp_sse_client
pip3 install immutables
pip3 install bidict

And finally it worked! I was able to list the packages that are installed.

(habapp) openhabian@openhabian:/opt/habapp $ sudo systemctl status habapp.service
● habapp.service - HABApp
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/habapp.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sat 2022-11-12 16:03:56 GMT; 2s ago
     Docs: https://habapp.readthedocs.io
 Main PID: 16102 (habapp)
    Tasks: 7 (limit: 4915)
   CGroup: /system.slice/habapp.service
           └─16102 /opt/habapp/bin/python3 /opt/habapp/bin/habapp -c /etc/openhab/habapp

Nov 12 16:03:56 openhabian systemd[1]: Started HABApp.
(habapp) openhabian@openhabian:/opt/habapp $ pip3 list
Package            Version
------------------ -------
aiohttp            3.8.3
aiohttp-sse-client 0.2.1
aiosignal          1.3.1
astral             2.2
async-timeout      4.0.2
asynctest          0.13.0
attrs              22.1.0
bidict             0.22.0
charset-normalizer 2.1.1
EAScheduler        0.1.7
EasyCo             0.2.3
frozenlist         1.3.3
HABApp             0.31.2
idna               3.4
immutables         0.19
multidict          6.0.2
paho-mqtt          1.6.1
pendulum           2.1.2
pip                22.3.1
pkg_resources      0.0.0
pycurl             7.45.1
pydantic           1.10.2
python-dateutil    2.8.2
pytz               2022.6
pytzdata           2020.1
ruamel.yaml        0.17.21
ruamel.yaml.clib   0.2.7
setuptools         65.5.1
six                1.16.0
stackprinter       0.2.9
typing_extensions  4.4.0
voluptuous         0.13.1
watchdog           2.1.9
yarl               1.8.1

I then endlessley faffed about with no success, watching the log with tail -f and duckduckgoing until I found this page which told me it was broken in OH3.3!! I went back in to the cli and removed HabAPP.

Back to plan A then. I will set up a venv and script to make it work with cron. I already have the script. Should have done this ages ago. All it does is tell me the kWh yesterday as a proof of concept. I already have an Item set up with the number.

import json
import pycurl
import certifi
from io import BytesIO
from openhab import OpenHAB

buffer = BytesIO()
c = pycurl.Curl()
c.setopt(c.URL, 'https://api.octopus.energy/v1/electricity-meter-points/xxxxxxxx/meters/xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/consumption/')
c.setopt(c.USERPWD,'xxxxxxxxxxxxx:')
c.setopt(c.WRITEDATA, buffer)
c.setopt(c.CAINFO, certifi.where())
c.perform()
c.close()

body = buffer.getvalue()
usage = json.loads(body.decode('iso-8859-1'))
# Body is a byte string.
# We have to know the encoding in order to print it to a text file
# such as standard output.
count = 0
yesterday = 0
for x in usage["results"]:
    yesterday = yesterday + x["consumption"]
    count = count + 1
    #print(count,x["consumption"])
    if count == 48:
        break
yesterday = round(yesterday,2)

base_url = 'http://openhabian:8080/rest'
openhab = OpenHAB(base_url)

# fetch all items
items = openhab.fetch_all_items()
items['Yesterday_kWh'].update(str(yesterday) + 'kWh')

And schedule that with cron by making a script to call it that has the full path to the venv inside calling the main.py

0 7 * * * /home/openhabian/projects/energy/energy.py

MQTT is an OASIS standard messaging protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). It is designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport that is ideal for connecting remote devices with a small code footprint and minimal network bandwidth.

https://mqtt.org/

I continue to use OpenHabian. Currently it does just a few (very useful) things:

• Turns on the heating in the TV room if the TV is turned on and it is cold outside and it is cold in the room
• Turns on the heating in my wife’s sewing room if her radio is on and her phone is on the wifi
• Thanks us for topping up the boiler (verbally) when the coffee machine turns off.

With the increase in electricity costs I thought it would be interesting to play with power monitoring smart sockets. I wanted to use tasmota but was too lazy to go through the rigmarole of flashing something myself. I bought four from athom. I imagined they would take weeks from Hong Kong or something but they came within a week. I should have read their shipping page which says 4-6 days.

Getting them to work with OpenHabian was fine. I just used some excellent instructions from the OpenHAB forum. MQTT explorer is excellent. The only minor change was that it does not tell you you can rename them in the MQTT configuration by changing the topic. I had to keep the faith with OpenHabian, and it worked first time.

Now I have to work out what to do with them. I bunged them on 171-174 ip address and plugged them in to the following:

1. Printer
2. Microwave
3. TV stack
4. PC

This reminded me that I really feel I need to understand openhabian better :-/