Any Opinions About The Hometroller?

[upstatemike]

Anybody have an opinion about the new Hometroller?

http://www.hometroller.com/

http://store.homeseer.com/store/HomeTrolle...ler-P380C0.aspx

http://www.homeseer.com/support/faqs/faq_hometroller.htm

 

[sandman]

Anybody have an opinion about the new Hometroller?

http://www.hometroller.com/

http://store.homeseer.com/store/HomeTrolle...ler-P380C0.aspx

http://www.homeseer.com/support/faqs/faq_hometroller.htm

Had a look at the Hometroller, few thoughts

1) Less moving parts, chance of not suffering as many failures
2) More targetted at the "black box" automator... plug it in, it works, (more than likely every time)
3) If you were selling your house, that would be MUCH more presentable than the bunch of PCs that most of us have running the house
4) I think the PC allows for a much lower cost of entry into HS than the troller
5) Low power usage, with rising electricity costs it would be more acceptable to Wife/Partner

Maybe point 2 is not correct, I'm not sure how flexible its going to be however I toyed myself going down the embedded XP path but the development tools were expensive.

Time will tell. I think its good for HS to broaden their market appeal. What I still would like to see is HS putting a few more of the "3rd party plugins" directly into HS and getting it stable..

CHeers..Pete

 

[electron]

I was surprised not many people responded when I posted that article. I am not really seeing the difference between this unit and the HS PRO100 (except for the fact that the HS PRO100 looks better imo), unless the difference is that it doesn't come with any plug-ins. Interesting product tho, and XPe definitely makes things much more reliable.

 

[TCassio]

The main differences between the Pro 100 and the HomeTroller is as Electron stated the Pro comes with all the plugins installed, the HomeTroller has no extra plugins other than what comes with HS. Also the HomeTroller uses a 40 gig notebook type hard disk, the Pro is all flash, no moving parts.

 

[macromark]

To all (so far): Thanks for the mention and... Pretty good assessment! Our primary goal with HomeTroller was to provide a unit that had all the functionality of HS2 combined with the most stable and reliable hardware platform possible (for the money). XPe has worked out very well in the PRO-100 and should do nicely here too.

On the subject of reliability: In addition to using XPe, we also added an integrated hardware/software watchdog (HSSentry™) that regularly sends a communication from the control software (HS2+) to the unit's hardware BIOS. If, for any reason, that communication is lost, the BIOS will kick in and reboot the unit. In addition, we've added another feature (HSProtect™) that write-protects the C partition of the drive to prevent unwanted writes to the OS. This feature may be overridden for installing drivers and other programs that require C drive writes.

 

[openboxtt]

Sandman said:
3) If you were selling your house, that would be MUCH more presentable than the bunch of PCs that most of us have running the house

Sandman, that's a good point.

In a similar vein,I have been deciding which TS route to take for my upcoming ELK install and it made me wonder if others, for the sake of the reason above, have forgone the extreme customisability of a client/server PC based TS system for an out of the box, no pc, plug and play TS solution, for the sake of an easier time when trying to sell house.

So, has anyone gotten a TS07 for example over a CQC setup for that reason?

 

[electron]

Sandman said:
3) If you were selling your house, that would be MUCH more presentable than the bunch of PCs that most of us have running the house

Sandman, that's a good point.

In a similar vein,I have been deciding which TS route to take for my upcoming ELK install and it made me wonder if others, for the sake of the reason above, have forgone the extreme customisability of a client/server PC based TS system for an out of the box, no pc, plug and play TS solution, for the sake of an easier time when trying to sell house.

So, has anyone gotten a TS07 for example over a CQC setup for that reason?

I guess you could consider me to be one of those people.

 

[upstatemike]

I was surprised not many people responded when I posted that article. I am not really seeing the difference between this unit and the HS PRO100 (except for the fact that the HS PRO100 looks better imo), unless the difference is that it doesn't come with any plug-ins. Interesting product tho, and XPe definitely makes things much more reliable.

At half the price of the PRO100 it got my attention. The PRO100 has no moving parts but the hard drive in the Hometroller might make it easier to install plugins? I think the HSSentry puts it in in the same reliability class as a Stargate or Homevision while still giving you the bells and whistles of a PC based system. It also supports a lot more stuff than an MControl or Cortexa system.

 

[electron]

With the PRO100, you don't have to install plugins, since it should come with all of them. If I got one of these, first thing I would probably do is replace the HD with a Compact Flash card (using a CF->IDE adapter).

 

[CollinR]

At half the price of the PRO100 it got my attention. The PRO100 has no moving parts but the hard drive in the Hometroller might make it easier to install plugins?

I would say thats a very likely assumption, once EWF is active it makes adding stuff a PITA. This way they can EWF the OS partition and allow the EU to write to the other drive.

I think the HSSentry puts it in in the same reliability class as a Stargate or Homevision while still giving you the bells and whistles of a PC based system. It also supports a lot more stuff than an MControl or Cortexa system.

IIRC the JDS Stargate is a true RTOS like an Elk, it's not the same. However it is much better then a default XP install.

Anothing thing not specifically mentioned but if this was done right it'll boot from a hybernation file. The result is boot times inline with a laptop returning from hybernation... Much faster then a conventional XP machine boots.

 

[upstatemike]

IIRC the JDS Stargate is a true RTOS like an Elk, it's not the same. However it is much better then a default XP install.

Anothing thing not specifically mentioned but if this was done right it'll boot from a hybernation file. The result is boot times inline with a laptop returning from hybernation... Much faster then a conventional XP machine boots.

May not be a true RTOS but I like the hardware watchdog and auto reboot. My Stargate rarely hangs but when it does it is done till I manually restart it.

On boot time... I think I saw a post on the HS board of around 45 seconds for the OS and then whatever is required to for HS which depends on the interfaces that have to initialize.

 

[smee]

I have a machine sitting next to me in an identical case (at least I think it's the same). Maybe, for now, I'll just put an HS sticker on it and pretend .