pilight Binding

The pilight binding allows openHAB to communicate with a pilight (opens new window) instance running pilight version 6.0 or greater.

pilight is a free open source full fledge domotica solution that runs on a Raspberry Pi, HummingBoard, BananaPi, Radxa, but also on *BSD and various linuxes (tested on Arch, Ubuntu and Debian). It's open source and freely available for anyone. pilight works with a great deal of devices and is frequency independent. Therefor, it can control devices working at 315Mhz, 433Mhz, 868Mhz etc. Support for these devices are dependent on community, because we as developers don't own them all.

pilight is a cheap way to control 'Click On Click Off' devices. It started as an application for the Raspberry Pi (using the GPIO interface) but it's also possible now to connect it to any other PC using an Arduino Nano. You will need a cheap 433Mhz transceiver in both cases. See the Pilight manual (opens new window) for more information.

Supported Things

Thing	Type	Description
bridge	Bridge	Pilight bridge required for the communication with the pilight daemon.
contact	Thing	Pilight contact (read-only).
dimmer	Thing	Pilight dimmer.
switch	Thing	Pilight switch.
generic	Thing	Pilight generic device for which you have to add the channels dynamically.

Binding Configuration

bridge Thing

A bridge is required for the communication with a pilight daemon. Multiple pilight instances are supported by creating different pilight bridge things.

The bridge requires the following configuration parameters:

Parameter Label	Parameter ID	Description	Required
IP Address	ipAddress	Host name or IP address of the pilight daemon	yes
Port	port	Port number on which the pilight daemon is listening. Default: 5000	yes
Delay	delay	Delay (in millisecond) between consecutive commands. Recommended value without band pass filter: 1000. Recommended value with band pass filter: somewhere between 200-500. Default: 500	no
Background Discovery	backgroundDiscovery	Whether pilight devices for this Bridge should automatically be discovered. Default: true	no

Important: you must explicitly configure the port in the pilight daemon config or otherwise a random port will be used and the binding will not be able to connect.

contact, dimmer, switch, generic Things

These things have all one required parameter:

Parameter Label	Parameter ID	Description	Required
Name	name	Name of pilight device	yes

Channels

The bridge thing has no channels.

The contact, dimmer and switch things all have one channel:

Thing	Channel	Type	Description
contact	state	Contact	State of the contact
dimmer	dimlevel	Dimmer	Dim level of the dimmer
switch	state	Switch	State of the switch

The generic thing has no fixed channels, so you have to add them manually. Currently, only String and Number channels are supported.

Auto Discovery

Bridge Auto Discovery

The pilight daemon implements a SSDP interface, which can be used to search for running pilight daemon instances by sending a SSDP request via multicast udp (this mechanism may only work if the standalone mode (opens new window) in the pilight daemon is disabled. After loading the binding this bridge discovery is automatically run and scheduled to scan for bridges every 10 minutes.

Device Auto Discovery

After a bridge thing has been configured in openHAB, it automatically establishes a connection between pilight daemon and openHAB. As soon as the bridge is connected, the devices configured in the pilight daemon are automatically found via autodiscovery in background (or via a manually triggered discovery) and are displayed in the inbox to easily create things from them.

Full Example

pilight.things

Bridge pilight:bridge:raspi "Pilight Daemon raspi" [ ipAddress="192.168.1.1", port=5000, backgroundDiscovery=false ] {
        Thing switch office "Office" [ name="office" ]
        Thing dimmer piano "Piano"  [ name="piano" ]
        Thing generic weather "Weather"  [ name="weather" ] {
            Channels:
              Type number : temperature "Temperature" [ property="temperature"]
              Type number : humidity "Humidity" [ property="humidity"]
        }
}

pilight.items

Switch office_switch "Büro" { channel="pilight:switch:raspi:office:state" }
Dimmer piano_light "Klavier [%.0f %%]" { channel="pilight:dimmer:raspi:piano:dimlevel" }
Number weather_temperature  "Aussentemperatur [%.1f °C]" <temperature>  { channel="pilight:generic:raspi:weather:temperature" }
Number weather_humidity "Feuchtigkeit [%.0f %%]" <humidity> { channel="pilight:generic:raspi:weather:humidity" }

fragment.sitemap

Switch item=office_switch
Slider item=piano_light
Text item=weather_temperature
Text item=weather_humidity

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