Documentation initiative

I know this is an old post but you say the need is real. This is rlkoshak from the openHAB Forums so I’d consider myself to be a fairly capable. But it also means I may do a brain dump here so please tell me to open a new thread if I veer too far off topic.

I just got my HestiaPi One in the mail and managed to get it installed. Except for the fact that those little black plastic rivets are worse that useless (seriously, I want to burn them all with fire until there is nothing left) the installation was pretty painless (beyond accidentally burning out a fuse but that is on me). Good job on that!

But now I’m up and running and looking around for some basic docs. But after installation I’m not really finding anything. For example, what exactly do all of these settings do? For example, what is the threshold for 2nd stage heating? What hysteresis is used to turn on/off the heater? Is there any? Stuff like this is either missing or hard enough to find that I couldn’t find it.

I know I can look in the code and probably will but not all of your users will be able to do so quite so easily.

I have to say that I’m a little surprised that settings are not being persisted with restoreOnStartup. If it’s restored some other way than openHAB Persistence maybe I’m not waiting long enough for a reboot before opening BasicUI. Watching openhab.log shows that having the UI opened generates a lot of Asynchronous processing no supported exceptions and it does seem to block anything useful from happening. It seems counter intuitive to have all my configs like whether or not the heater is on return to OFF on a restart. How would I set that persistence up (obviously I know the answer but that’s besides the point).

What exactly is backed up and restored when I click those buttons in BasicUI? Just openHAB configs or does it include everything important (e.g. Mosquitto? config).

Should I only update through the UI? Or is it safe to do an apt update? It appears to be running OH 2.4. What if I’d like to run 2.5? Is it safe. Is that what the upgrade button does on BasicUI?

These are the sorts of questions I would expect to be answered in the docs. I’m sure I can answer many or all of these by reviewing the rules and scripts but not everyone will be able or want to do that. And honestly it would save me a good deal of time if it were documented.

Ultimately I would like to get rid of the Mosquitto running on this RPi 0 to free up some resources and use a plain old MQTT event bus (requires OH 2.5 though). It would be interesting to see how/whether the boot and runtime performance changes or improves if the Rules were written with Scripted Automation and the NGRE on 2.5. I’ve seen significant performance improvements but I’m running on stuff much more powerful. Anyway, I digress.

The above questions are the sorts of things I would expect to be answered in the documentation.

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