I started exploring openHAB for my home automation. Looks to be a great application for the home automation. I want to automate two homes and want to run openHAB on one centrally placed server. Is it possible to segregate the data for my two homes and provide use based access for two homes.
Or I will have to have to instances running on my server.
Please suggest if anyone has done this earlier.
you can (I believe) provide different sitemaps, but the most importing question is how will a central openhab instance communicate with the "other" home? Especially If you're going to use bindungs which require a piece of hardware like z-wave etc.
You can potentially play with MQTT and have a small Raspberry Pi running in the "other" home feeding the MQTT.
Assuming that there is not a hardware or range based issue with using OpenHab for two homes (e.g. z-wave USB dongle but second home is out of range) and there is network connectivity between the two houses, there are a number of ways you can accomplish this. Here is one.
The easiest would probably be to just use a naming convention for your items and groups to easily tell which house the item comes from. You would probably want to set up a separate sitemap for each house as well. If I understand your question this should segregate the data for you based on name and provide use based access for each home.
If you want to segregate the data even more thoroughly you can configure your persistence to save all the items from one house to one DB and all the others to a different one, though you will need two different persistence bindings set up (i.e. one uses rrd4j and another uses db4o). I'm not sure this provides any advantage.
The final step is getting the data from the remote house into openHab. How this is accomplished will depend on the nature of the sensors and triggers in the other house. You can use the HTTP binding, TCP/IP binding, or an MQTT broker. I've personally exposed a couple of my Raspberry Pi based sensors to openHAB using a python script and the paho library that publishes the sensor data read from the GPIO pins to an MQTT broker and it works great.
Centralization vs segregation - you have to decide, which one has more advantages and less risk.
The two houses will store data on the server (openhab2, mqtt, DB/rr4d) and each one have access to it - that must be clarified.
The network connectivity is obvious, it should be stable between the two sites. Security is another issue - not only digital, but safety of life (hvac controlling or safety appliances with network outage?).
Configuration is pretty supported in both ways, separate config files (items, rules, persistence, etc) and connectivity in a hierarchy has endless approaches and capabilities.
In the newest version of the android app you can add multiple openhab servers. Why don't just use two instances of openHAB?
