HOME AUTOMATION: OpenHAB2 on the Pine64

I "bought" a Pine64 Pro with a WiFi/Bluetooth adapter on Kickstarter that I had originally planned to use as the home automation server to replace my RPi 1, but I was never really committed to the installation as the early builds for the Pine64 were pretty unstable.

Things have developed and become more stable since then and with the recent release of OpenHAB2 it seemed like the right time to jump back in.

Installation

I tried a few different builds to get the Bluetooth adapter working with no luck, there seem to be a lot of people complaining about the lack of support for the Bluetooth device on the forums. Because of that I decided to just stick with the most stable build of Linux for the Pine64, which at the time of writing is the Ubuntu image, and use a USB Bluetooth adapter if I needed to integrate Bluetooth in to my OpenHAB installation.

It's worth noting that there is an OpenHAB image for the Pine64 but I was never able to get this to boot so I abandoned it and started with a Ubuntu image.

I downloaded and unzipped the image using 7zip and used Win32 Disk Imager to write the image to the SD card.

I plugged my device into the internet via ethernet for first boot so I could SSH in without having to set up the WiFi network.
Login to your router and find the IP address of your Pine64. Alternatively you could use an app for your phone like Fing Network Discovery Tool to find the device IP address.

I use Putty to SSH in to my devices from my Windows machine. It's a nice little tool that allows a few different connection types including SSH and Serial and ability to save sessions for frequently used devices.
While there is no location for a username you can add one to the saved session by typing the username in to the host name box as follows:

 ubuntu@192.168.1.151  

PuTTY Saved Session

The default password for the Ubuntu image is 'ubuntu'.


Reboot your device with the command:

 sudo shutdown -r now  

Install Java with the following commands:

 echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu xenial main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/webupd8team-java.list  
 echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu xenial main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/webupd8team-java.list  
 sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys EEA14886  
 sudo apt-get update  
 sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer oracle-java8-set-default  

Now that Java is installed we can install the OpenHAB2 official release:

 wget -qO - 'https://bintray.com/user/downloadSubjectPublicKey?username=openhab' | sudo apt-key add -  
 echo 'deb http://dl.bintray.com/openhab/apt-repo2 stable main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openhab2.list  
 sudo apt-get update  
 sudo apt-get install openhab2  

Start OpenHAB and add it to startup with the following commands:

 sudo systemctl start openhab2.service  
 sudo systemctl status openhab2.service  
 sudo systemctl daemon-reload  
 sudo systemctl enable openhab2.service  

If everything installed and started correctly you should be able to navigate to the page:

 http://YOUR.DEVICE.IP:8080  

From here you should be able to follow the beginners guide to get your device going.

If you get stuck and need to work out what is happening with you OpenHAB installation you can view the log file with this command:

 tail -f /var/log/openhab2/openhab.log -f /var/log/openhab2/events.log