We use a Wink hub to communicate with our ZigBee devices – scripts on the OpenHAB server make web calls over to the Wink hub to set bulb levels. Works great on outbound communication to the bulbs, but it is not real-time bi-directional (i.e. if a bulb level is changed elsewhere, OpenHAB would need to poll and get the new value). Doesn’t matter for the GE Link bulbs because there isn’t another way they get set beyond dropping and returning power (which turns the bulb on at 100%), but we cannot use the Wink hub to communicate with interactive devices — unlock the door manually and OpenHAB has no idea the light should be turned on until the next polling cycle. And polling is a lot of extra overhead – check every device every minute 24×7. And it’s slow – hit the polling cycle wrong and it takes a minute from unlocking the garage door before the light turns on.

Had the idea of monitoring data that moves across the serial interfaces and use a script to communicate real-time inbound changes over to OpenHAB. Watching the serial interface, we get lots of cryptic traffic from socat:

socat -x /dev/SerialPort,raw,echo=0,crnl PTY,link=/dev/ttyV1,raw,echo=0,crnl