As mentioned in my previous post about the home automation mess, openHAB seemed like a promising project, but installation on my Synology NAS seemed a bit too involved, as said NAS holds all my backups, I did not feel like hacking it too much.

It turns out I had a Raspberry Pi lying around, and there is a OpenHAB image for this device, so I set up a dedicated node. This turned out to be more straightforward than I expected, the device booted up, it took quite some time to set itself up, but once it it was ready, I just had to create a user account and start adding my devices.

OpenHAB is a rich system, but it has a rather complicated model and I’m still figuring out how things work, but I managed to get it to recognise the inverter the myStrom power adapters, my old Denon amplifier and the various Universal Plug and Play devices in the house, which is nice, except we rarely use this feature these days.

While most of the devices were recognised easily, I also wanted to get the status of the printer. The good news is that there is a SNMP module, but that one requires a custom configuration, so here is the one I created for my Brother printer.

UID: snmp:target:5f782a74af
label: Vukovic-SNMP
thingTypeUID: snmp:target
configuration:
  retries: 2
  hostname: vukovic.home
  protocol: v1
  port: 161
  refresh: 60
  community: public
  timeout: 1500
location: Office
channels:
  - id: PrinterDisplay
    channelTypeUID: snmp:string
    label: PrinterDisplay
    description: ""
    configuration:
      oid: .1.3.6.1.2.1.43.16.5.1.2.1.1

This will pull the text displayed on the printer’s LCD screen (or the string Sleep).