Finally Did It!

[huggy59]

Well, I bit the bullet and finally moved to HS2. Even though it was still failing in my test instance, I learned that it was probably due to my bringing my old (and fairly complex) 1.7 configuration into HS2 that blew things up. That and using the older 1.x plugins and scripts. They seem to really upset HS2, depending on the combination and how they are written.

Since I have a relatively simple HA need at the moment (I'm starting over in a new home), I've installed HS2 and started from scratch. So far it is working ok (but 6 hours isn't much of a test). I'll let you know how things go. My test instances never lasted more than a week before dying. I'm using X10, Ocelot, MR26A, some custom scripts for other info I'm pulling in, and a couple scripts installed from the HS2 updater. I also have more to add to it.

I probably should go to another HA system, but I can't afford it at the moment. HS is paid for. Oh well...

Yeah, e, I know, ELK M1... someday! hehe

 

[Rupp]

huggy59 ,
What version did you start with?

 

[Skibum]

HS reliability has really gone up recently. No more log errors.
Too bad it took 6 months of HST blaming my "setup" and not looking to their own program for fixes.
None the less, I'm happy.

 

[jrfuda]

Huugy, that's the same thing I'm gonna do, since I have to physically move anyway. When I get to the new house. I'll start fresh with a basic HS 2 install and add stuff back in as I (if I) get it setup. At a minimum, I'll have the home theater and my reminders/announcements setup.

 

[WayneW]

Now that it is getting reliable, it is a shame that the good upgrade price is long gone.

 

[Aaron]

huggy,
you said you have a complexs system and then you say you have simple HA needs? Which is it?

Peronsally I see HS2 as a waste of $. You are paying them to beta test their software. And you are paying a pretty penny now. Not to mention that the features in 2 are 99% the same as in 1.7.

My 1.7 on a P2-500 w/ 384MB RAM has been rock solid for over 2 years now.

HS2 is just a waste of $ and now you can spend even more $ buying more expensive 3rd party plug-ins like the Harmony front-end that will finally make HS2 what Rich SHOULD have made it for how much he is charging... by the time you get done with an HS2 setup that can do complete HA and also act as a home theatre front end you'll be paying over $500... not me.

There is free software that does better on the HA/HT front-end dept for MUCH less and the old HS works just the same as the new one!

 

[Rupp]

huggy,
you said you have a complexs system and then you say you have simple HA needs? Which is it?

Peronsally I see HS2 as a waste of $. You are paying them to beta test their software. And you are paying a pretty penny now. Not to mention that the features in 2 are 99% the same as in 1.7.

My 1.7 on a P2-500 w/ 384MB RAM has been rock solid for over 2 years now.

HS2 is just a waste of $ and now you can spend even more $ buying more expensive 3rd party plug-ins like the Harmony front-end that will finally make HS2 what Rich SHOULD have made it for how much he is charging... by the time you get done with an HS2 setup that can do complete HA and also act as a home theatre front end you'll be paying over $500... not me.

There is free software that does better on the HA/HT front-end dept for MUCH less and the old HS works just the same as the new one!

Aaron,
This board is getting a reputation for HomeSeer bashing and posts like yours only adds to that reputation.
I find it odd that you believe that HS 1.7 does everything that HS 2.1 does when HS 1.7 can't run the Insteon plugin, the new bluetooth plugin, the fingerprint plugin just to name a few. There have been several enhancements to the HS engine to make it truly multi-threaded which allows it to process multiple script/plugins simultaneously. Granted it has taken more time to get HS 2.0 stable than the HomeSeer techs thought but for those of us that have been around for a while this is just as we expected. Given a bit of time HS will get it right. The new stuff will be rolled out soon. One thing that's coming is a calendar based event processing. So while it has taken the HS crew a bit of time to get HS stable it's only going to get better from here.

If you want to spend $500 on HS and add ons you can but I run a complete home on 2 add on plugins.

 

[huggy59]

I'll try to answer in order...

Rupp, I started way back with a very early version of HS and upgraded, reinstalled, and honed the system over many years. The latest version running here before this move was 1.7.25.

Ski, glad you are happy. I'll see how well production use goes here.

JR, yep, I believe that's the best way. I had two scripts I needed to bring forward, and those are working ok.

Waynew, I had purchased the upgrade near the end of the upgrade deal because I thought that EVENTUALLY I might want to move to 2 if they got it working ok. So I guess that was a good move - we'll see!

Aaron, I had a very complex system when I lived in FL. It used to be listed as an User profile example system on the HS site - you can read about it there: http://www.homeseer.com/profiles/users/gordon_cunningham.htm .

I moved to Maine last August and am starting over from scratch in a new house with (when I bought it) no HA gear. I had started testing HS2 in FL using my complex HA system. I installed HS2 and imported the FL HS 1.7 config and had nothing but problems. As I said, HS2 wouldn't run a week without crashing hard.

After I moved to Maine, I took a smaller config (a subset of the FL config) and ran that into HS2 and again had weekly crashes. I was running this version in a VMware image and had only 2 serial ports to use, so it had to be a much simpler config. My full-blown FL config used 9 serial ports for various interfaces.

Today I am starting over using HS2 on the main machine, which is a 1.1GHz AMD Athlon XP, 1gig RAM, 160x2 mirrored drives, 18 serial ports, etc. The system also runs my CyberGenie phone system, VWS weather station software, and a few other smaller packages. I use Windows 2000 for the HA stuff. I also have HS run MRTG using Perl for some graphing I pull out of certain network devices, like my UPS, etc.

At the moment, I have an Ocelot which I use for my powerline interface for X10, an MR26A for receiving RF X10, the Oregon Scientific weather station, a CyberGenie phone system, a few plug-in modules for lamps and appliances, a couple wall switches for lighting, motion sensors for triggering lighting and notification, events to deal with various times of day, lighting, etc., and some scripting to import data from the weather station and run MRTG for some stats collection and graphing.

I also added the weather warnings, recipes, and shopping list scripts, but a couple of those have issues (need to be written better, IMO). So I may pull those since they require either the authors to fix them, or my time to do it, which I don't have to spend right now.

I have yet to set up (and wire up in this house) and hook in: Temp05 and other 1-wire stuff, Ninja pan/tilt camera bases, my streaming cameras, all the IR stuff for home theater control, Touchpad, UltraView2, CM17A, phone, new web control pages, VR, access control, alarm system, etc. etc. etc. I'll take these one step at a time with HS2.

 

[huggy59]

Rupp, I have to agree that HS2 bashing is beating a dead horse now. My beef has always been that HST pulled 1.7 from the market before 2 was stable, and that they've not SUCCESSFULLY brought all existing interfaces forward into HS2.

It reminds me of what I consider a serious step backwards - the issue with HSPhone 1 vs 2 - lost a lot of functionality, increased hardware costs and limited availability, all in the name of reliability and supportability, which eventually killed the product.

For me, the big draw of using HS is still the scripting interface. If I don't like the way someone wrote a script or plugin, I can write my own. I tend to choose open-source or other software subsystems that do most of the functions I want and then just write glue scripts and data conversion code to tie them into each other and to the over-arching HA system. Like MRTG, VWS, CG, etc.

As long as HS2 has this interface and it is still viable in terms of working to the level the other portions of the system, I'll be able to use HS2. Now we'll see how the new .NET stuff from MS bears out.

What's the rule? Never go with the 1.x release of any MS product? ;-)

 

[Skibum]

Aaron

I'm a HS basher just like the rest... when it is deserved.
My point is that it is starting to look like HST has finally started to put the gremlins to bed and put out a fairly reliable product. HS2 is a much better package than 1.7 was. It's only problem was that it did not work.. Now that it seems to be finally working it is beginning to shine. There are features in HS2 that I had been waiting for for a long time. Distributed speech and VR is the big one for me. This was a must have.

Was I annoyed with the release of BROKEN software, and a time limit to upgrade? Yes.
Did I fing it VERY frustrating trying to deal with Rick Tinker? Yes
Did I find it frustrating everytime I complained of an issue that it was spit right back at me "it is your setup" Yes
Am I vindicated now because I have changed nothing, and HS now magically works? Yes. It was all messed up HS code, and NOT my setup.

At the end of it all, do you just stay pissed, or accept that the software is finally ready for prime time? For me, well, it's a no-brainer.

 

[AutomatedOutlet]

This board is getting a reputation for HomeSeer bashing and posts like yours only adds to that reputation.

Rupp,

In defense of this board, I don't think HS is targeted here and I haven't seen anyone post anything on any boards saying that CT is getting a "reputation" for this. Where have you seen this?

I can't think of a single technology that hasn't been "bashed" here but I don't really think it's bashing. The point is that bringing out "issues" is a way for people to learn more about the products and work through them.

Every technology has issues. This is how people learn about issues and how to get around them in order to maximize their own HA experience.

Just my 2 cents...

 

[electron]

Aaron,

This board is getting a reputation for HomeSeer bashing and posts like yours only adds to that reputation.

Rupp,

The only people who seriously believe this board has a bad reputation for Homeseer bashing is the HST staff (which is supposedly why they will not allow CocoonTech.com to review the HS PRO-100, a big mistake imho).

There has been plenty of (justified) criticism of Homeseer, that I will agree with, but some of these 'bashers' are the same people who are now saying that the product is running great. So obviously their complaining (or bashing as you like to call it) paid off, and was warranted.

HST should have used this opportunity to interact with the CT community (HST is registered here), and establish a great relationship with the users. Instead they chose to do the opposite.

Look at what Dean went through when he first signed up here, plenty of people had plenty of negative comments/questions, but he actually used this opportunity to find out what it is we want, and significantly improve his product to the point where people are actually switching now.

Anyways, I am glad to hear that HS2.0 is more stable now, and that people are giving it another chance. I just wanted to comment to that statement since it was injustified imo.

 

[Rupp]

Martin,
I'll hold my comments on this. I'm obviously biased so my opinion doesn't carry much weight. Ski states the facts best albeit harshly at times. I'm not here to cause problems or to offend anyone but to offer information.

 

[DavidL]

HST made a great long term committment move. As everything in software development, it's always bigger than what it initially appears. 2.1 is working very well now, but I haven't had much issues with it since the first HS2.0 beta. Mostly nusance error messages that don't take the server down. The multithreading of HS2 is worth the debugging period. Should more testing have been done in beta to lock down issues? - probably, but that is in hindsight.

Cinemar has been doing it's fair share of tons of testing internally and beta testing its new MainLobby3 and MLServer2 products. But, it has taken about 6 months longer than any of us would have thought it would take. I am REALLY hoping that our release will happen this week. Still a bit more testing on a new MLServer2 capability needs to happen this week before we know for sure. So, that is the opposite situation - spend lots of time in testing and Cinemar customers have been complaining of no new product introductions. I just hope that when it does release that no major gremlins appear. I think we have done the homework to prevent that from happening.

I am really glad that HST appears over the hump and getting back on a roll. HST / CQC and Cinemar products are close to being ready to be taken seriously by the pro market. That should make Mr. Gates glad

 

[Dean Roddey]

Getting OT, but I think that the single biggest thing holding back products like ours is the wide availability of good, affordable, finger driveable wireless tablet products that are robust and which don't include a lot of stuff that's not wanted in this type of application. This is the biggest area where we cannot offer a competitive product against Crestron/AMX type systems. I'm hoping that the UMPC thing will create more products in this space. We'll see.

I think that, combined with an Elk or Omni, we can be quite competitive in terms of raw automation functionality and stability, but there's still that missing piece in terms of the pretty, robust, fixed function tablet out front for the family units to use in the theater and other places.

With sufficient resources of course we could have one built to our specifications, but that's a fairly large committment because of minimum order rqeuirements before a company will do that kind of work, and so the price would have to be pretty high. It would be a lot nicer if we had a number of CE companies out there competing in this market so that we had lots of choices and competitive prices.