Upgrade HomeSeer to 2.0 ?

I have a current copy of HomeSeer and received the promotional offer to upgrade to

2.0 for $39. I am wondering if my current version of the HAI Omni Plug-in would continue to work with the new version. (I sent email to HomeSeer asking this question a week ago but no response yet.)

And what is everyone's feeling about having to install the .NET framework to support this new version ?

George

Reply to
George Pontis
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On Thu, 8 Sep 2005 16:42:59 -0700, George Pontis wrote (with possible editing):

I think I'm in exactly the same situation. FWIW, I did upgrade. (I wish I hadn't) I think you should go to the Homeseer forums

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and read what others have said - actually it seems to be quite negative. The setup I am using - Homeseer 2 with NEW HAI plugin, seems to mostly work when the machine is running, but there are errors. There is a missing file and the machine is reboots a lot. Since Homeseer doesn't seem to want to run as a service, a reboot stops everything.

The new web interface is pretty nice, but until this gets some stability, I'd stay away. I have got my HAI OmniPro II doing almost all of the work now. The only reason for using HomeSeer was to take advantage of its interface with the ACT I103 and its more powerful output. (I have a few outbuildings). I don't use the phone and other stuff, and I find the consoles WAY overpriced.

I don't know if the instability problems are due to the .NET framework or Homeseer - the latest build is 1972. If you read the feedback under the forum message "Build 1972 Feedback", you'll see that more than a few others are having problems.

FWIW, the machine it's running on uses Windows 2000 Pro...

Email me if you'd like more feedback.

Reply to
L. M. Rappaport

I had quite a bit of trouble with the installation.

I dont have internet access on my computer running my house, and when I need an update to homeseer, I can only plug in a modem.

So much to my surprise, everytime I went to install HS2 from a USB thumb drive, it wanted to access the internet. I later found it wanted the .NET framework. Not only that, it wanted .NET SP1 too. I had to download that directly from microsoft at a friends house and install it via my thumb drive first before installing HS2. I'm not sure, it may come with the CD version of HS2 but isnt included with the downloaded version..

Once I had .NET installed, the install process died because us.txt wasnt included in the download, so I had to dig that from my old HS1 installation. BTW, I'm installing this on a celan "test" computer, not my actual "production" computer.

I get everything installed, and then it wants to go back to the internet to register itself (I'm getting really frustrated with this internet addiction). HS2 is going with a microsoft type registration process where you provide some computer unique information, and the HS servers respond with the registration code. Once again, no internet, so I followed instructions, emailed the license codes and received the registration keys a day later and manually enterred them.

This is what really worries me. If I ever get this thing working to my satisfaction, I'll have to go through the whole registration process on a different computer and convince them I dont have two copies running. And what happens if the computer crashes in the middle of the night and I have to wait for them to send me a registration key to get things running again. I'm not sure I'm too keen to try this.

The actual program seems to run OK. I'm running build 1972, but my setup is pretty simple. Just several events, no scripts. From the little I've played with it, it responds much faster than HS1 did. Operation of the lights just seem snappier. My z-wave lights definitely work faster.

Oh yeah, I've never been able to get the Updater to work at my house. As I said before, I'm on a dial up modem and things download real slowly at 28Kb. There seems to be a session timer at a minute and a half that cuts the update session off everytime I try. It worked just fine however when I carried the entire computer over to my friend's house and connected it to his cable modem. I can really see myself doing that with the actual production computer every time I need an update.

I've started looking at the other automation programs out there principly because of this registration issue. Unfortunately there are only a few on the market that handle z-wave, I havent liked their human interface. So for now, I'm hoping HS gets their act togther and things turn out OK and I can stay with HS. I'm sticking with running HS 1.7 until things stabilize a bit more.

dickm

Reply to
dicko

CQC supports Z-Wave, and it has a far more powerful interface system than HS, and doesn't have any of the issues you are concerned about in your post, so you should at least give it a whirl before you decide. On

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go to the Learn tab, and you can go through the Quick Tutorial which will quickly give you a hands on tour of the product.

------------------------------------- Dean Roddey Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems

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Reply to
Dean Roddey

Dean I actually downloaded the free trial of CQC and gave it a try. I came away with a few impressions

  1. Its not a program for non-technical people. I had a tough time trying to figure out what was happening and in the end, I still couldnt get it to do a simple event: "if A1 received, then send B1". I assume I had to write a script but could find no examples of how to do that. Even though I work in the computer industry, I'm not a programmer and had no clue where to begin. Do you have an example of how do this that you should show me? I'd be glad to revisit it.
  2. I really liked the z-wave implementation. It seemed to work faster/snappier than homeseer2. You even copied over the groups as well as the individual units into CQC which I thought was really useful. Things worked well when using the onscreen on/off buttons but again, I didnt know how to make things happen upon reception of a powerline command. It also appeared to react faster for X10 too. Press an on screen on/off button and the light turns on/off without the latency I notice in HS1 and in a lesser extent HS2. I even didnt notice the problems with the zwave USB interface that I have with Homeseer. Oh, you should make the USB zwave driver part of the download package. I had to hunt all over the CQC website to find a reference as to to where to download the drivers. Or at the very least put a reference to it on the main CQC download page.
  3. CQC seems to be oriented toward AV control, which I do very little off. I just want to make lights go on and off. So I had little use for the extensive screen drawing/control flow user interface. Unless I missed something and that is where I really implement the events I want. It looked to me like I could design a virtual control panel for my A/V system but unless I wanted to control my house from the computer screen, I couldnt use it to create events.
  4. I didnt see any support for X10 RF like the W800 or MR26 receivers which is important to me. Again, I guess its different applications.

My overall impressions was that it was a well crafted program and an excellent program for A/V control. I had thoughts of going out and buying a wireless tablet PC and creating the ultimate remote control but thats not the application I need it for. But while it is infinitly flexible, that flexibility comes at a price. it is complex to install and program. I dont think its a program for newbies, certainly not for someone without a background in computers.

dickm

Reply to
dicko

Bearing in mind, of course, that it doesn't support the same range of devices as HomeSeer. CQC does indeed look like a solution well worth considering, provided it's supported devices are sufficient for you.

Reply to
wkearney99

I upgraded now to take advantage of the lower price of the upgrade. I will test before going into production, but it seems to work fine. That will take several weeks/months at least, 1.7 is a fine product.

I received registration codes by email, so I dont expect problems going from test to production machine. I do agree with the worry of software expecting to be on a internetworked computer. Homeseer is one of those programs now, like WIndows itself is. Homeseer is a kind of program that shines in a (home) network though!

Hans,

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Reply to
HansO

I'll be sure to give it another try when 1.5 hits the streets.

dickm.

Reply to
dicko
  1. Its not a program for non-technical people. I had a tough time

You were not hallucinating. That doesn't exist yet. It's coming up in the

1.5 release, and will likely be the only 1.5 major feature, so that we can get it out very fast. For us, unlike HS, these types of things have to be on a network wide basis, since CQC is fully network distributed, so it's a lot more complex problem for us. But we've worked out our strategy and I'm working on it as we speak actually. Once we get this in place, that will be the last significant hole filled on the core automation side.

I'm kind of leary of putting third party drivers in the actual package. The package is documented on the Z-Wave driver page. Any time you have a question about a given device, go to Learn,then Suppored Devices and check the driver docs for that device. Any third party drivers needed by that device will be linked to there.

Well, I would say that, in addition to traditional automation, it's strong in the theater and media management areas :-) It's not really oriented towards anything, since it's just driver based. But it just has a good number of drivers for theater oriented devices at this point. And I'd argue that the extensive user interface support we have is very much important in the traditional home automation world as well, though it's not important to every user of course.

There aren't currently drivers for those. We'll be getting them before too much longer, and of course someone else could do them if they want to.

------------------------------------- Dean Roddey Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems

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Reply to
Dean Roddey

Yeh, it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't thing. We don't have the range of device support that HS does, but if you look at what HS is going through right now, in large part because they never really controlled their own device support and depended on third party support of highly varying quality and commitment, it's something that we've always been careful about. We do of course support third party drivers, and all the tools are in the package, but we work closely with each person implementing one and vet them carefully. We just cannot afford to get into the situation HS is in.

------------------------------------- Dean Roddey Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems

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Reply to
Dean Roddey

Support for plugins they own is a problem also. I suspect the push to get HS2 out the door consumed every resource they had, and will probably continue to do so for some time.

Reply to
Brian W. Antoine

June of what year? :)

Reply to
Brian W. Antoine

It sure did. I have had a help ticket for a problem with a Homeseer supported plugin since JUNE and nothing yet except WE ARE LOOKING INTO IT and that they are swamped with support for the HS2 and can't support a HS1 plugin.

NOT GOOD.

We just cannot afford to get into the situation HS is in.

Reply to
Don

The reason that Savoy pulled CyberHouse from the DIY market was the same reason that they pulled it from the installer market and (I gather) the reason that Premise Systems was sold to Motorola and is in now limbo -- the difficulty of supporting hardware from multiple vendors.

This is a rough row to hoe ...

Marc Marc_F_Hult

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Reply to
Marc F Hult

I'm just finishing up support for a pure-software based solution that allows us to access serial ports at our customer's homes. So you'll just need to have CQC installed at the client side and that will allow us to connect to a device there and do development of serially based drivers. I think that this will make a big difference in our ability to support new devices since we don't have to have them sent here or buy them ourselves. The customer can just give us access to the serial port.

We were initally going to use an IP based multi-port card, but they are somewhat expensive and we'd only have a limited number of them to send around. So I just said the heck with it and did a software based version. Our product is built on our own very extensive object framework, so abstracting a serial port was pretty straightforward. The driver development tools just allow you to enable access to a remote serial port server running at the customer's site, which they can run and enable when needed, and his ports show up as local ports to the driver development tools.

We could already do IP based devices this way of course, I did the Sony Qualia driver like that, and it worked out quit well. But serial devices were always a problem. That's a hole that we've now closed. I'll be adding 4 very useful new drivers over the next week using this new feature.

Try that with Homeseer :-)

------------------------------------- Dean Roddey Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems

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Reply to
Dean Roddey

Neat! Does that mean I'm absolved from disconnecting and mailing the Aprilaire thermostats, DMX lighting controller, Slinke and so on ?? ;-) The idea of foregoing HVAC, lights and music would be/is too suggestive of a disaster situation ...

Remote Desktop Connection (RDC)/ Microsoft Terminal Server Client and Server are standard with XP Pro and Server 2003 and allow the option of connecting remote serial ports, so I don't see exactly why this couldn't be done with Homeseer. A kludge to be sure.

One advantage of an IP-based serial hub is the ability to have failover of hard-wired serial connections to a backup PC -- on site or remote. A minor advantage in most cases, but could be very useful in remote installations such as a cabin or where the local folks are unwilling/unable to set things right.

.... Marc Marc_F_Hult

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Reply to
MFHult

If they already have an IP-based box we could certainly use it, but it often requires that we install whatever Acme virtual comm port drivers that box requires on our side, and we aren't too hip on doing that on our system. This scheme means we don't have to deal with any of that.

Another reason why I went forward with this is that about 80% of that work is the same work that will be required to support serial ports that don't have such virtual com port drivers, such as the GC-100, to make them look like regular com ports to us (though it's still limited in that case because the GC-100 ports are very limited in their capabilities.)

------------------------------------- Dean Roddey Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems

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Reply to
Dean Roddey

Got it: a trade off that increases uncertainty and potential for driver conflicts/BSOD. FWIW, I've found Comtrol drivers to be rock-stable.

OK. But couldn't you use a PC with multiple com ports supported by the _OS_ to serve as an IP serial hub? I suppose that puts you in the serial hub "market" which may not be what you want.

And I still don't see why MSTSC/RDC isn't a solution. If I have CQS (or Homeseer, Cyberhouse, Premise) running on a local machine, why can't the program use the comm ports on a remote PC as if they were native? Or vice-versa? I use MSTS/RDC all day long with no problems. But I've just assumed that the comm ports work as advertised. Am I missing something?

One question this line of discussion can eventually lead to is whether a back-up server (whether CyberHouse, Homeseer, Premise or CQS) requires a second licence ;-)

Marc Marc_F_Hult

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Reply to
MFHult

Since CQC is fully distributed, and if you already have a PC there, we'd just say load CQCServer there and let it do control locally and all of those devices will then be available anywhere else on the network. That would be a better deal for us, since you've already got the PC there anyway.

Customers might not want to give us that level of control. Our scheme just provides us access to serial ports and nothing else. And I'll probably set it up so that customer can limit it to particular serial ports. So we have a lot less 'liability' this way, since we can't possibly get into anything we shouldn't or do any damage to the PC if we are writing drivers late at night and are a bit foggy. Wouldn't want to erase their hard drive by accident or anything :-)

The other thing is that unless they have Windows Server or something like ThinSoft, then in order to RDP into their machine we lock them out of it completely, AFAIK. XP only supports a single session, and if you RDP into it you lose the local session. This way we don't prevent them from continuing to use their automation system while we work on a driver.

------------------------------------- Dean Roddey Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems

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Reply to
Dean Roddey

This is what I am used to because it is also the architecture of CyberHouse (since 1997 at least). In the case of CyberHouse, the clients are/were available free and downloadable by anyone and the servers are/were licensed with additional fees for additional devices.

Frankly, the ability to for anyone to download valid clients of the net (Homeseer, CyberHouse, Premise, CQS) is not helpful from a security standpoint. Fortunately both CyberHouse and CQS have useful security measures. Homeseer 1.x had too many security issues of various sorts to be considered (by me, for my needs). Dunno about 2.x.

By "better deal for us" I hear you to mean mostly that it is more robust and easier to hook into, not in any particular financial sense.

Good points all.

Yours is a 'better way' IMO.

Marc Marc_F_Hult

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Reply to
Marc F Hult

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