So I looked into some of those small Intel boxes and they are quite small. I do not have much experience with linux or ubuntu, Windows and Android are my area of understanding , but from what i have read and heard; running linux or Ubuntu frees up a lot of memory for the services you actually want to try run on the system. Do you run any other software on the tiny machine? Would running something like Kodi cause massive slow downs? If I wanted to have to have the interface distributed to about 12 clients would that be possible from the small box or would it be better to run it from my NAS?pete_c said:
Best home automation controller for wifi and IoT
- Thread starter mistert
- Start date
pete_c
Guru
Do you run any other software on the tiny machine?
Base OS of Ubuntu 18.04 64 Linux replaced Windows 10 64 bit running on the 64 Gb eMMC. It is sold as a TV Box and has a tiny footprint.
I am running Windows 7 Embedded on it for running SAPI and Homeseer windows only plugins. Today you can run a Homeseer plugin remotely connecting to the mothership from any computer running Linux or Windows.
You could run Home Assistant on the Linux OS and Homeseer on the Windows OS if you wanted to.
I collect speech fonts here so have different voices that do different things and now have added Alexa voices to the mix.
Relating to your NAS you will be limited by the CPU and RAM on your box relating to running VM's in containers.
Here originally utilized Microsoft Media Center on an Aopen digital engine. Then went to XBMC and then KODI still running it on an Aopen digital engine. Purchased a few of the Aopen digital engines a few years back. (bulk purchase).
Been tinkering with the new Arm / Intel TV Boxes. I wanted to run Kodi and see 4K movies from NAS or streaming.
All of the arm based TV boxes come stock with Android. I would rather run KODI in Ubuntu than Android. So wrote Armbian Linux (Ubuntu) to the emmc media on the Arm TV boxes. I did turn an Arm 9-core TV box in to an Ubuntu automation server (also running Homeseer and Home Assistant) and it worked well. Android has been wiped on most of these boxes now.
I have replaced the Aopen digital engine used for Kodi now to a smaller / lighter 9 core arm TV box running Ubunt Linux KODI and it streams 4K just fine.
So now my TV STB's here are all KODI boxes. I have two HD Homerun boxes on line and all of it plays well together. Have another box here running MythTV (many many years) and Logitech Media Server.
Base OS of Ubuntu 18.04 64 Linux replaced Windows 10 64 bit running on the 64 Gb eMMC. It is sold as a TV Box and has a tiny footprint.
I am running Windows 7 Embedded on it for running SAPI and Homeseer windows only plugins. Today you can run a Homeseer plugin remotely connecting to the mothership from any computer running Linux or Windows.
You could run Home Assistant on the Linux OS and Homeseer on the Windows OS if you wanted to.
I collect speech fonts here so have different voices that do different things and now have added Alexa voices to the mix.
Relating to your NAS you will be limited by the CPU and RAM on your box relating to running VM's in containers.
Here originally utilized Microsoft Media Center on an Aopen digital engine. Then went to XBMC and then KODI still running it on an Aopen digital engine. Purchased a few of the Aopen digital engines a few years back. (bulk purchase).
Been tinkering with the new Arm / Intel TV Boxes. I wanted to run Kodi and see 4K movies from NAS or streaming.
All of the arm based TV boxes come stock with Android. I would rather run KODI in Ubuntu than Android. So wrote Armbian Linux (Ubuntu) to the emmc media on the Arm TV boxes. I did turn an Arm 9-core TV box in to an Ubuntu automation server (also running Homeseer and Home Assistant) and it worked well. Android has been wiped on most of these boxes now.
I have replaced the Aopen digital engine used for Kodi now to a smaller / lighter 9 core arm TV box running Ubunt Linux KODI and it streams 4K just fine.
So now my TV STB's here are all KODI boxes. I have two HD Homerun boxes on line and all of it plays well together. Have another box here running MythTV (many many years) and Logitech Media Server.
Pete,pete_c said:
Are you maried? lol I ask because I wonder if you projects all pass the WAF?
That is a lot of items and setup. I may be picking your brain quite often. lol just letting you know.
The nas I was thinking of using is the Synology DS918+ and I am hoping that all the systems that I want to run can be run in Docker. Thoughts?
I would like to try and have all the software that i am considering trialing or using on one machine if possible.
pete_c
Guru
Are you maried? lol I ask because I wonder if you projects all pass the WAF?
I am and wife accepts what I do as it keeps me busy. It has for the last 30 years or so.
She will not touch the touch screens except for the simple OmniTouch 5.7 serial screens.
I installed wall PIRs and ceiling PIRs and for a bit did a follow me automation around the house for lighting.
This was low on the WAF and I shut most of the interior house stuff off. Alexa spooks her but she accepts the devices.
You might want to DIY a NAS.
I run HA today in Docker plus some other stuff. I have not run Docker in a Virtual box yet. I have read about dockerizing windows apps.
You can purchase an 8 drive case small and tight build with an mITX board. Raid controller has skinny wires for each SATA drive so that part is easy.
And utilize the Synology OS or the preference here of BSD for NAS. BSD never breaks.
I am and wife accepts what I do as it keeps me busy. It has for the last 30 years or so.
She will not touch the touch screens except for the simple OmniTouch 5.7 serial screens.
I installed wall PIRs and ceiling PIRs and for a bit did a follow me automation around the house for lighting.
This was low on the WAF and I shut most of the interior house stuff off. Alexa spooks her but she accepts the devices.
You might want to DIY a NAS.
I run HA today in Docker plus some other stuff. I have not run Docker in a Virtual box yet. I have read about dockerizing windows apps.
You can purchase an 8 drive case small and tight build with an mITX board. Raid controller has skinny wires for each SATA drive so that part is easy.
And utilize the Synology OS or the preference here of BSD for NAS. BSD never breaks.
So I am not ruling out hubitat, but want to back up and make sure i am looking at the bigger picture in relation to the things I want to have the system accomplish. Right now the only I am focused on is outline the capabilities that I want to have to to software and hardware that will make it possible. I have not looked into Homeseer 4 and what it will have. You are right , i need to plug into the forum and gather some information about the UDI system.upstatemike said:
upstatemike
Senior Member
What do you mean by interface? A voice assistant is an interface, a touch screen is an interface, a hard button remote control is an interface...
I think in most situations the user interface(s) are separate from the programming interface of the HA software. I've never understood why folks get concerned about the GUI for programming a system as long as the user devices are easy and intuitive.
I think in most situations the user interface(s) are separate from the programming interface of the HA software. I've never understood why folks get concerned about the GUI for programming a system as long as the user devices are easy and intuitive.
Sorry Mike, I should have been more specif; I was taking about the User interface. And yes the user interface is separate from programming, but for the people that will be using it every day it is a lot more important to them then what is making all the cool or fun things happen.upstatemike said:
I would like to have a GUI that supports voice, high end touchscreens and handheld remotes, although i fear the latter a bit more difficult of a feat to achieve. Currently the GUI interface that I think are top in the DIY space are ranked in this order:
Allonis
The Home Remote
Homeseer
Home Assisstant
OpenHab
I am making this comparison based on gui interface I have seen online, and i am comparing them to systems like Savant and Control4.
Pete, with the fall or projected fall of the Omnipro system, has does the ELK M1 compare? Does it allow me to write lines of code in the same way i could do it with the Ominipro? If I am fairly familiar with programming steps f and code lines for the Omni, could I with a short amount of training pick up and program the Elk M1?
123
Senior Member
mistert said:
Yes, I used it for awhile almost a year ago (discussed its use here: A fresh new face for Premise).
Based on my experiences at the time, the developer provided excellent support and frequent product updates. The reason why I abandoned it is because even creating a basic UI requires a fair amount of tinkering. That may be considered to be a strength (everything is adjustable) or a weakness (few defaults; lots of adjusting required). Just laying out a grid of sliders and toggles to represent my home's lights took far more time and effort than its utilitarian appearance would suggest.
It's also important to note that The Home Remote is not home automation software (unless something changed dramatically in the past year). You can create logic to react to certain events but it's a far cry from the likes of Homeseer, openHAB, Home Assistant, Premise, etc.
tl;dr
For my tastes, it took more effort to produce a UI than I was willing to invest and the finished result suggested (i.e time + effort > results).
mistert said:
I've not just compared online images but used three of the five products you've listed (THR, HA, and OH).
After setting THR aside I switched to openHAB. It took less effort to produce a GUI using openHAB's Basic UI than to produce the identical result in THR. However, Basic UI is what it says, basic; it won't win any eye-candy awards. I experimented with openHAB's HABpanel. You define the UI directly within the browser and the results are decidedly prettier. However, at the time I used it (early last spring) the library of UI widgets was limited and so was the ability to customize each widget. You can create your own widgets and there's a growing library of user-contributions but there's a caveat.
Ideally, you would install someone's 'alarm control panel' widget and it would know how to reference itself to the parameters you've defined for your alarm control panel. openHAB's HABpanel can't do this because openHAB has no means of saying 'this collection of parameters defines an alarm control panel'. It will be a bunch of unrelated parameters representing the alarm mode, its state, the passcode, etc. So when you download someone's UI widget for an 'alarm control panel', you'll have to manually map your parameters to whatever the UI widget uses (assuming it even handles all the parameters you have).
It was this lack of, what I'll call, complex abstractions (like locks, alarm control panels, thermostats, etc) that soured me on using openHAB to create a UI. Mapping parameters to a UI widget is time-consuming.
I then switched to Home Assistant because it does have 'complex abstractions' like alarm control panels, thermostats, etc. So now if I define a thermostat called `climate.thermostat` I can represent it in the UI using either the default one in Home Assistant's UI library or anybody's custom climate widget (without having to map any parameters). Switching from one 'look' to another is just a matter of changing one line.
The default UI library contains 24 widgets (called 'cards' in Home Assistant). The library of user-contributed cards is substantial and growing. Each card typically allows for customization (by adjusting its parameters) or you can alter its source-code (cards are written in JavaScript).
In terms of aesthetics, that's in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I prefer very spartan UIs because I rarely use them and when I do I only want to refer to critical information. Others may want to create (wall-mounted) dashboards with the ability to present, and control every aspect of their automated home. For an example of what can be done with the default card library there's a demo here demonstrating how you can modify cards directly within the browser (or you can define them in a text file). For an example of how far you can alter the UI, here's an example where the author made it look like an enhanced version of Apple's Homekit UI.
One more example of the UI looking vastly different from the default one (relies on theming and custom cards to get that look).
That is one of the things that forced me to pause on the project. Was I trying to create something that already existed, that while it possibly could some money would same me significant amounts of time..123 said:
You are spot on , Bill has been phenomenal at providing users with expedient support.
123 said:
So based on what I am hearing although the UI was easier to design it was not as polished as The Home Remote. So unless others on here would say otherwise I would take your feedback and not go down the path of using the UI aspect of OpenHAb123 said:
So Home Assistant would then be an open, but how does it compare in terms of the level of effort required to THR?123 said:
Have you seen the UI's for Allonis? maybe not played with them but can provide your perspective.
I am so glad you responded to my post. I think that what I was asking is a critical part when someone like me is trying to map out what they want there systems to be able to accomplish. It may not be as important as the programming aspect, but for everyone else that will bet to use and enjoy it this may be a deal breaker for them.
123
Senior Member
Whatever I said that gave you that impression, it wasn't my intention. It's entirely possible to create an attractive UI with openHAB's HABpanel (see examples here). Mapping a widget's elements in HABpanel is no more onerous than in Home Remote. Both lack complex abstractions so you'll be mapping each individual element of an alarm panel or thermostat or lock.
I use the term 'mapping' but another term is 'binding'. For example, you must bind a slider control to, say, a light's brightness parameter. You bind a toggle control to a light's powerstate parameter. To represent a thermostat, you might need to use more than a half-dozen controls and bind each one to a parameter (setpoint temperature, ambient temperature, HVAC operating mode, current HVAC state, humidity, fan mode, fan status, etc).
FWIW, there's no need to do mapping/binding in Home Assistant. It supports complex abstractions of common household devices (thermostats, alarm panels, locks, etc). For example, it detects your Ecobee thermostat and creates a named 'entity' (like climate.ecobee). If your thermostat cannot be automatically detected, you would define it manually, specifying the thermostat's type, its desired entity name, etc. Done. The UI will now automatically render your thermostat entity using a stock thermostat card. If you don't like its appearance or placement you can swap the card for another (perhaps a custom card made by a contributing user), reposition it, move it to a new tab in the UI, etc. No need to re-bind/re-map any UI controls/widgets.
Once you've installed Home Assistant, the level of effort to create the UI is considerably less than THR. However, in the interests of honesty and transparency, the installation of Home Assistant is a chore compared to THR. Remember, with Home Assistant you're installing and configuring a full-blown home automation system whereas THR is a UI builder.
This brings me to the topic of deployment. With THR, you use its designer software to create a UI targeted for a specific device's screen-size and operating system. The result is a file that you place on the target device that is running THR's renderer app.
I had created one version of a UI for my Android phone and another for my wife's iPhone. Any changes to the UI required modifying both flavors (Android/iOS) and sending (myself and) my wife a new version of the file (as an email attachment). This is not an uncommon deployment technique (for this kind of application). Nevertheless I didn't find it to be very convenient, especially during the initial phase of the UI when it is subject to frequent nips and tucks.
openHAB and Home Assistant render their UIs using web technologies so the target device only needs a (modern) browser. Deployment is only a matter of updating the UI and it, of course, becomes immediately available to all devices.
A UI created with THR is designed for a specific screen-size (i.e. screen resolution). The UI produced by OH and HA is designed to resize itself to fit the device's available screen-size. To be precise, based on my experiences many months ago, HABpanel didn't resize its UIs all that well (this may have been improved by now). It over-expanded widgets when there was more screen real-estate available. If you compensated by shrinking the original design, it would look too small when viewed on a smaller screen. So it was sort of resolution-specific. In contrast, Home Assistant does a more eye-pleasing job adapting its cards to the available space. For my purposes, I prefer Home Assistant's adaptability but I can understand why someone might want to create a UI optimized for a very specific screen-size.
Current drawbacks in HA's UI are:
- It cannot be based on the logged-in user (there's sort of a workaround for it)
- You can't have more than one active UI design (yet another kludge is available).
Perhaps a future version will address these issues.
I really can't say very much about Allonis because what can one really say by seeing only one or two examples? Unless you have access to many other examples, all I can see is what is shown on their web-site, which isn't very much at all. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place? What they do show is, to be honest, rather simple and easily replicated in THR, OH, or HA (and probably all the others you mentioned, except I've never tried them).
I think it's also important to mentioned the issue of price. We are comparing products that vary from zero to hundreds of dollars. We should be lowering our expectations (for feature set and product support) when looking at a free product and raising them when considering a product costing a quarter to a half grand.
Hey Pete,
Looking to get a mini PC, I know that I could build one, but I don't have the time or desire to do that part. I am interested in trialing a few automation system at the same time. Wou
While I would like to eventually run my system on my NAS, I think this will be very helpful in the trialing periode.
What do you think about this machine
HP DESKTOP600 MINI G3.I can upgrade the memory and Hdd as needed
Looking to get a mini PC, I know that I could build one, but I don't have the time or desire to do that part. I am interested in trialing a few automation system at the same time. Wou
While I would like to eventually run my system on my NAS, I think this will be very helpful in the trialing periode.
What do you think about this machine
HP DESKTOP600 MINI G3.I can upgrade the memory and Hdd as needed
pete_c said:
pete_c
Guru
What do you think about this machine? HP DESKTOP600 MINI G3
Looks nice. Thinking they are discontinued Skylake CPU computers. I see them on Ebay for around $300.
For testing you can purchase a Levova Tiny M93 off lease computer for around $100 with 4th generation I-Series CPU, 4-8 Gb of RAM and an SSD or SATA hard drive. Here just purchased one for a Homeseer user in Ireland.
I purchased a few of these a couple of years ago for family desktop computers. Paid around $200 then with a MS Windows 10 Pro license.
Looks nice. Thinking they are discontinued Skylake CPU computers. I see them on Ebay for around $300.
For testing you can purchase a Levova Tiny M93 off lease computer for around $100 with 4th generation I-Series CPU, 4-8 Gb of RAM and an SSD or SATA hard drive. Here just purchased one for a Homeseer user in Ireland.
I purchased a few of these a couple of years ago for family desktop computers. Paid around $200 then with a MS Windows 10 Pro license.
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