Just a quickie review of the build of a new Homeseer computer.
This computer will be only utilized to run Homeseer 3 and nothing else. (no media server, CCTV or NAS).
Note this computer will not be used as a NAS nor any VMs.
The Unique parts of this build will be that its two computers. One will be running Microsoft Windows 8.1 / Ubuntu 14.04 (both 64 bit).
Power draw is minimal at around 63 watts for the Intel Core i3-4130
- Motherboard - Gigabyte Intel H81 GA-H81N
- CPU - Intel Core i3-4130 3.4Ghz
- CPU 1U Fan replacement - Intel fan was too tall
- Memory - 8 Gb - 16 Gb 1333Mhz DDR3 Non-ECC
- mSATA - 128 Gb - SSD (used m.2 128Gb in one computer and a standard mSATA 128 Gb SSD in another computer).
- PicoPSU - 160 Watt / Power supply brick
- Case #1 - M350 - you can DIN mount it to a wall or plywood or whatever.
- Case #2 - Casetronic Travla C137 Mini-IT
Computer #1
Homeseer 3 Pro Ubuntu 14.04 64bit OS base
- Mono install
- Homeseer 3 will be installed in the /usr/local/HomeSeer directory
- Wine 32/64
- Microsoft SAPI in Wine
- Homeseer 3 Pro speaker dot exe running in Wine
- Neospeech 32 bit TTS fonts
- LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql & PHP)
- Webmin
Hardware wise the only add was a slim cd/dvd rom drive. I really didn't need this add as you can install any OS these days via USB stick. That said the case matchs 4 other server cases today. The case is twice the size of the motherboard. Will post a picture.
Box #2 in M350 mITX case
Homeseer 3 Pro Windows 8.1 64bit Windows 7 OS base
- Homeseer 3 will be installed in xxxx directory
- Neospeech 32 bit TTS fonts
28th of February, 2015
- Delivery of ordered products came today from Amazon - two days via Amazon Prime - well packaged via Federal Express. Note everything except for the PicoPSU / Power bricks came from Amazon. Good communications from Amazon and Ebay vendors.The PicoPSUs and Power Bricks were ordered via Ebay.
4th of March, 2015
Tested one motherboard burn in for 24 hours with 160 Watt PicoPSU. Intel CPU fan very quiet. Ordered newest m.2 mini SSD which is a replacement for the mSATA drives. It is the size of my thumb. Ordered an m.2 to mSATA bracket.
The front panel LED / Power on cables will need to be extended about 4" which is no big deal.
Intel CPU fan is a bit high going to just under the cover of the case. SATA/FAN bracket will not fit with Intel CPU fan.
3rd picture shows cables re-rerouted and tie wrapped. The power / LED cable were extended a bit.
The Intel CPU fan is too tall. I mean the cover fits fine but you cannot add the single plate for another SATA drive or more fans to the case.
Settled on this cpu fan (Dynatron T450) as it is the same one I am using for the BCM boards and it works well. The PITA part is mounting the plate under the motherboard. I will need to remove everything as pictured below to mount the fan bracket (which is a no big deal thing).
Personally my BCM motherboards utilize CPU fans which screw down to the motherboard using a plate on the underside. Much nicer than the plastic clip on style of CPU fan (really junk to me).
7th of March, 2015
Connected a small SATA drive to the current hardware and did a quickie build of Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit. I am impressed with the speed comparing this hardware to the currently running HS2 box / BCM motherboard running with an Intel Core Duo. Much faster and very quiet. Installed Mono, Webmin and LUbuntu on this base box yesterday. Note that this box will only be utilized to run Homeseer; nothing else at this time. The small 160 watt pico PSU and power brick is not warm to the touch. The BIOS on this motherboard appears almost to be another operating system unlike any BIOS I have seen to date. It is very tweakable.
Moving HS3 running on the Aopen DE box to this build in the next couple of days.
8th of March, 2015
Open work bench testing motherboard. Installed Ubuntu / LUbuntu 14.04 64 bit on it. Boot to OS is almost instant and you don't hear it. Very fast.
Installed back up copy of Homeseer 3 to device. Boots up Homeseer 3 very fast from a cold boot. Everything is super fast including the navigation from Homeseer 3 page to page; drop downs et al. I am impressed.
What is left to do now is:
1 - replace Intel CPU fans - they are quiet but way too tall and appear to be made for the earlier iSeries 3 CPUs as the Haswell iSeries chips run much cooler. Going with pictured above picked low profile (1U) CPU cooling fan. One motherboard is already installed in the M350 case. I will need to remove this motherboard as the CPU fan mounts to a metal bracket you fit on the bottom of the motherboard. I do not like those spring clips; never did; they have a cheap look about them.
2 - Fit the m.2 mini sata drives to an mSATA daughter board (tiny thing).
3 - Get more familiar with the motherboard BIOS as it's more like a mini OS for the motherboard base boot kernal stuff. It does have an optional legacy look mode than does actually look like the BIOS screens of yesteryear. I thought that the Asus AMD Bios was unique a couple of years ago when building my NAS drive.
4 - put the motherboards back in a case.
5 - Load up the Wintel / Linux OS on each of the two. I have already completed the Linux base and will image it to the m.2 device. Windows 7 will be utilized for the Wintel OS based Homeseer 3 box. Concurrently here playing with embedded Windows 7 on a slow and old Atom Intel CPU and the newer mini Windows 8.1 on the Pipo X7. Both are quick (quicker) than previous playing with OS's.
6 - An interesting Factoid about the unrelated Pipo X7 mini pc. It runs Linux faster than Windows because its running Linux in 64bit mode while it runs Windows in 32 bit mode. This relates to a non yet included 64 bit EFI boot file in the BIOS. The current issue with Linux is that the audio drivers do not work or have not been found / built for the HDMI port on the device. Video streaming stuff (using the GPU built in to the CPU) is faster in Linux than Windows (well and windows is fast anyways). Well and you can today do all of the netflix stuff in Wintel and Android but no Linux (but they are trying).
11th of March, 2015
1 - Removed motherboard from M350 case and installed Dynatron 1U CPU fan. It is as quiet as the original larger Intel CPU fan.
2 - Installed included M350 case SATA drive or fan bracket. Fits with ample space now.
3 - Pending m.2 SSD to mSATA card installation.
4 - pending motherboard pico PSU installation power cables will need to be extended for Travla C128 case as power cable is about 6" too short.
15th of March, 201516th of March, 2015
1 - Testing out Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials on a spare Sata drive on computer #2.
2 - Used Rufus to burn install ISO image to USB stick. Much easier to do this in Linux.
25th of March, 2015
Finished Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit machine. While still waiting for the m.2 adapters; put an mSATA card in the Ubuntu box. Moved it to server rack.
26th of March, 2015
Received m.2 to mSATA board for computer #2. Works fine. I had to modify a spacer though that holds down the m.2 card to the mSATA card. Tiny stuff.
28th of March, 2015
1 - Installed Windows 7 64 bit on computer # 2.
2 - Having an issue installing Neospeech 32 bit voice fonts. No problems installing them; just not working with included SAPI 5.4 64bit. Looking for a work around.
Found that you have to use the 32 bit speech control applet which is located here:
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Speech\SpeechUX\sapi.cpl (forgot about this). Note that in Windows 8.1 32 bit Neospeech voice fonts installation was a non issue.
3 - noticed too bios having a slow time of booting with an older USB keyboard/mouse combination but very quick with a newer wireless keyboard mouse combo. I have not updated BIOS nor modified it at this time.
4 - Installed Homeseer 3 Pro release version to C:\Homeseer3
5 - Homeseer 3 and Speaker dot exe runs in 32 bit mode such that it is using the 32 bit speech control applet. I do see an issue with voice recognition when it is enabled. Not sure yet about this part. Stuck here - IE: speaker dot exe works fine in 32 bit mode talking (TTS) via the SAPI 32 bit speech control applet. Voice recognition in both control applet and speaker dot exe does not work at this time.
11th of April, 2015
1 - Install Windows 7 32 bit. Removed it next day not really testing it.
2 - read confirmation that Windows 7 64 bit works with VR and TTS - Installed 64 bit Windows 64 bit
3 - updated build with Microsoft Updates
4 - newest issue with current build - no matter what I do none of the USB ports are being recognized by the W7 64 build. USB sticks or Keyboards or Mice. That said used a USB connected DVD Rom drive, USB Keyboard, USB Mouse to install W7 64 bit. None is recognized now. It's as if W7 64 bit shut down the USB ports. Very frustrating. I did read / install multiple USB 3.0 patches. It shouldn't have anything to do with the USB 2.0 ports.
5 - Note here that any USB mouse / keyboard combination works fine in the graphical BIOS.
6 - What a PITA. The issue was relating to an unknown device showing up in the Control panel / devices. I updated the device; it came up as a USB 3.0 device. Then for whatever reason all of the USB 2.0 devices that I plug in now work like nothing ever was wrong.
7 - updating Windows 7 64 bit to continue today
8 - installed Homeseer 3 Pro to default directory
9 - working fine - speaker dot exe working fine - didn't check VR - plugged in combo speaker / microphone
10 - shutdown HS3 and installed Neospeech voices
11 - Tested TTS/VR with Neospeech Kate - works
12 - walked across the carpeted room and inserted second usb stick. I had shoes on. I saw a spark. Computer rebooted and messed with OS. Needed to restore.
13 - installed USB update (lost keyboard), neospeech voices and Homeseer3
14 - noticed that the Neospeech Kate voice wasn't in the text to speech applet
15 - installed HS3 Pro
16 - Speaker dot exe shows Neospeech TTV. VR doesn't error. Looks to be all running in 32 bit mode - works now - must have been the root directory install before?
17 - configuring PC to auto login user
18 - turned down UAC for loading Homeseer 3 using a 3rd party application.
19 - added 7Zip and Snapshot (disk imaging).
Looking at a variety of means to mount the M350 to a wall. Today using DIN mounts for the automobiles.
22nd of April, 2015
Updating Ubuntu Homeseer box to 16Gb of base RAM.
29nd of April, 2015
Updated RAM to 16Gb 28th and all is well. Considering now moving to an i5/i7 Haswell CPU / well too another box with same motherboard stuff.
30nd of April, 2015
Finished a new LUbuntu 14.04 64 bit build yesterday. It works fine but it's too fat now and starting all over again today.
1st of May, 2015
Well ended up having issues with the new Intel HDA sound drivers on the LUbuntu build. Note that the motherboard passes the sound to the HDMI port, Optical port or analog port.
I was able to get the sound working but it was mainly related to adding the kitchen sink to the build in drivers which was too much. Historically I have not used the sound output on the new Linux build as I do not like the TTS default font. I am also just using an embedded XPe build for running speaker dot exe. Redid the build again to Ubuntu 64 bit / LTS. The sound drivers got updated right away. I then thinned out the build removing the stuff I didn't need. (well too using Ubuntu 14.04 / 64 server build would solve my issues except for the sound output). Homeseer is running fine in this manner. I also took the audio output and using a mixer blending the TTS with the older Homeseer 2 boxes running. Next though maybe trying a virtual box tiny build of W2003 for just the text to speech stuff running on the Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit build and comparing it to the Wine stuff. I did upgrade the memory on the box from 8 Gb to 16 Gb.
8th of May, 2015
1 - Installed virtual box on Buntu build
sudo apt-get install virtualbox
2 - Installed W2003 server VB
3 - Installed Neospeech voices
4 - Installed Homeseer 3 speaker dot exe
5 - Configured Speaker dot exe to connect to HS3 Pro running on Ubuntu
6 - Configured W2003 session to autostart with Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit
7 - tested client to work fine.
19th of August, 2015
1 - Installed Digi Anywhere USB drivers / Digi 8 Port Edgeport to VB
2 - Connected Digi 7 port power USB hub / Digi 8 Port Edgeport to Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit box.
3 - Tested remote Z-Wave plugin on RPi2 to Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit box to work fine (IE: RPi2 / Z-Wave + POE in attic)
This computer will be only utilized to run Homeseer 3 and nothing else. (no media server, CCTV or NAS).
Note this computer will not be used as a NAS nor any VMs.
The Unique parts of this build will be that its two computers. One will be running Microsoft Windows 8.1 / Ubuntu 14.04 (both 64 bit).
Power draw is minimal at around 63 watts for the Intel Core i3-4130
- Motherboard - Gigabyte Intel H81 GA-H81N
- CPU - Intel Core i3-4130 3.4Ghz
- CPU 1U Fan replacement - Intel fan was too tall
- Memory - 8 Gb - 16 Gb 1333Mhz DDR3 Non-ECC
- mSATA - 128 Gb - SSD (used m.2 128Gb in one computer and a standard mSATA 128 Gb SSD in another computer).
- PicoPSU - 160 Watt / Power supply brick
- Case #1 - M350 - you can DIN mount it to a wall or plywood or whatever.
- Case #2 - Casetronic Travla C137 Mini-IT
Computer #1
Homeseer 3 Pro Ubuntu 14.04 64bit OS base
- Mono install
- Homeseer 3 will be installed in the /usr/local/HomeSeer directory
- Wine 32/64
- Microsoft SAPI in Wine
- Homeseer 3 Pro speaker dot exe running in Wine
- Neospeech 32 bit TTS fonts
- LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql & PHP)
- Webmin
Hardware wise the only add was a slim cd/dvd rom drive. I really didn't need this add as you can install any OS these days via USB stick. That said the case matchs 4 other server cases today. The case is twice the size of the motherboard. Will post a picture.
Box #2 in M350 mITX case
Homeseer 3 Pro Windows 8.1 64bit Windows 7 OS base
- Homeseer 3 will be installed in xxxx directory
- Neospeech 32 bit TTS fonts
28th of February, 2015
- Delivery of ordered products came today from Amazon - two days via Amazon Prime - well packaged via Federal Express. Note everything except for the PicoPSU / Power bricks came from Amazon. Good communications from Amazon and Ebay vendors.The PicoPSUs and Power Bricks were ordered via Ebay.
4th of March, 2015
Tested one motherboard burn in for 24 hours with 160 Watt PicoPSU. Intel CPU fan very quiet. Ordered newest m.2 mini SSD which is a replacement for the mSATA drives. It is the size of my thumb. Ordered an m.2 to mSATA bracket.
The front panel LED / Power on cables will need to be extended about 4" which is no big deal.
Intel CPU fan is a bit high going to just under the cover of the case. SATA/FAN bracket will not fit with Intel CPU fan.
3rd picture shows cables re-rerouted and tie wrapped. The power / LED cable were extended a bit.
The Intel CPU fan is too tall. I mean the cover fits fine but you cannot add the single plate for another SATA drive or more fans to the case.
Settled on this cpu fan (Dynatron T450) as it is the same one I am using for the BCM boards and it works well. The PITA part is mounting the plate under the motherboard. I will need to remove everything as pictured below to mount the fan bracket (which is a no big deal thing).
Personally my BCM motherboards utilize CPU fans which screw down to the motherboard using a plate on the underside. Much nicer than the plastic clip on style of CPU fan (really junk to me).
7th of March, 2015
Connected a small SATA drive to the current hardware and did a quickie build of Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit. I am impressed with the speed comparing this hardware to the currently running HS2 box / BCM motherboard running with an Intel Core Duo. Much faster and very quiet. Installed Mono, Webmin and LUbuntu on this base box yesterday. Note that this box will only be utilized to run Homeseer; nothing else at this time. The small 160 watt pico PSU and power brick is not warm to the touch. The BIOS on this motherboard appears almost to be another operating system unlike any BIOS I have seen to date. It is very tweakable.
Moving HS3 running on the Aopen DE box to this build in the next couple of days.
8th of March, 2015
Open work bench testing motherboard. Installed Ubuntu / LUbuntu 14.04 64 bit on it. Boot to OS is almost instant and you don't hear it. Very fast.
Installed back up copy of Homeseer 3 to device. Boots up Homeseer 3 very fast from a cold boot. Everything is super fast including the navigation from Homeseer 3 page to page; drop downs et al. I am impressed.
What is left to do now is:
1 - replace Intel CPU fans - they are quiet but way too tall and appear to be made for the earlier iSeries 3 CPUs as the Haswell iSeries chips run much cooler. Going with pictured above picked low profile (1U) CPU cooling fan. One motherboard is already installed in the M350 case. I will need to remove this motherboard as the CPU fan mounts to a metal bracket you fit on the bottom of the motherboard. I do not like those spring clips; never did; they have a cheap look about them.
2 - Fit the m.2 mini sata drives to an mSATA daughter board (tiny thing).
3 - Get more familiar with the motherboard BIOS as it's more like a mini OS for the motherboard base boot kernal stuff. It does have an optional legacy look mode than does actually look like the BIOS screens of yesteryear. I thought that the Asus AMD Bios was unique a couple of years ago when building my NAS drive.
4 - put the motherboards back in a case.
5 - Load up the Wintel / Linux OS on each of the two. I have already completed the Linux base and will image it to the m.2 device. Windows 7 will be utilized for the Wintel OS based Homeseer 3 box. Concurrently here playing with embedded Windows 7 on a slow and old Atom Intel CPU and the newer mini Windows 8.1 on the Pipo X7. Both are quick (quicker) than previous playing with OS's.
6 - An interesting Factoid about the unrelated Pipo X7 mini pc. It runs Linux faster than Windows because its running Linux in 64bit mode while it runs Windows in 32 bit mode. This relates to a non yet included 64 bit EFI boot file in the BIOS. The current issue with Linux is that the audio drivers do not work or have not been found / built for the HDMI port on the device. Video streaming stuff (using the GPU built in to the CPU) is faster in Linux than Windows (well and windows is fast anyways). Well and you can today do all of the netflix stuff in Wintel and Android but no Linux (but they are trying).
11th of March, 2015
1 - Removed motherboard from M350 case and installed Dynatron 1U CPU fan. It is as quiet as the original larger Intel CPU fan.
2 - Installed included M350 case SATA drive or fan bracket. Fits with ample space now.
3 - Pending m.2 SSD to mSATA card installation.
4 - pending motherboard pico PSU installation power cables will need to be extended for Travla C128 case as power cable is about 6" too short.
15th of March, 201516th of March, 2015
1 - Testing out Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials on a spare Sata drive on computer #2.
2 - Used Rufus to burn install ISO image to USB stick. Much easier to do this in Linux.
25th of March, 2015
Finished Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit machine. While still waiting for the m.2 adapters; put an mSATA card in the Ubuntu box. Moved it to server rack.
26th of March, 2015
Received m.2 to mSATA board for computer #2. Works fine. I had to modify a spacer though that holds down the m.2 card to the mSATA card. Tiny stuff.
28th of March, 2015
1 - Installed Windows 7 64 bit on computer # 2.
2 - Having an issue installing Neospeech 32 bit voice fonts. No problems installing them; just not working with included SAPI 5.4 64bit. Looking for a work around.
Found that you have to use the 32 bit speech control applet which is located here:
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Speech\SpeechUX\sapi.cpl (forgot about this). Note that in Windows 8.1 32 bit Neospeech voice fonts installation was a non issue.
3 - noticed too bios having a slow time of booting with an older USB keyboard/mouse combination but very quick with a newer wireless keyboard mouse combo. I have not updated BIOS nor modified it at this time.
4 - Installed Homeseer 3 Pro release version to C:\Homeseer3
5 - Homeseer 3 and Speaker dot exe runs in 32 bit mode such that it is using the 32 bit speech control applet. I do see an issue with voice recognition when it is enabled. Not sure yet about this part. Stuck here - IE: speaker dot exe works fine in 32 bit mode talking (TTS) via the SAPI 32 bit speech control applet. Voice recognition in both control applet and speaker dot exe does not work at this time.
11th of April, 2015
1 - Install Windows 7 32 bit. Removed it next day not really testing it.
2 - read confirmation that Windows 7 64 bit works with VR and TTS - Installed 64 bit Windows 64 bit
3 - updated build with Microsoft Updates
4 - newest issue with current build - no matter what I do none of the USB ports are being recognized by the W7 64 build. USB sticks or Keyboards or Mice. That said used a USB connected DVD Rom drive, USB Keyboard, USB Mouse to install W7 64 bit. None is recognized now. It's as if W7 64 bit shut down the USB ports. Very frustrating. I did read / install multiple USB 3.0 patches. It shouldn't have anything to do with the USB 2.0 ports.
5 - Note here that any USB mouse / keyboard combination works fine in the graphical BIOS.
6 - What a PITA. The issue was relating to an unknown device showing up in the Control panel / devices. I updated the device; it came up as a USB 3.0 device. Then for whatever reason all of the USB 2.0 devices that I plug in now work like nothing ever was wrong.
7 - updating Windows 7 64 bit to continue today
8 - installed Homeseer 3 Pro to default directory
9 - working fine - speaker dot exe working fine - didn't check VR - plugged in combo speaker / microphone
10 - shutdown HS3 and installed Neospeech voices
11 - Tested TTS/VR with Neospeech Kate - works
12 - walked across the carpeted room and inserted second usb stick. I had shoes on. I saw a spark. Computer rebooted and messed with OS. Needed to restore.
13 - installed USB update (lost keyboard), neospeech voices and Homeseer3
14 - noticed that the Neospeech Kate voice wasn't in the text to speech applet
15 - installed HS3 Pro
16 - Speaker dot exe shows Neospeech TTV. VR doesn't error. Looks to be all running in 32 bit mode - works now - must have been the root directory install before?
17 - configuring PC to auto login user
18 - turned down UAC for loading Homeseer 3 using a 3rd party application.
19 - added 7Zip and Snapshot (disk imaging).
Looking at a variety of means to mount the M350 to a wall. Today using DIN mounts for the automobiles.
22nd of April, 2015
Updating Ubuntu Homeseer box to 16Gb of base RAM.
29nd of April, 2015
Updated RAM to 16Gb 28th and all is well. Considering now moving to an i5/i7 Haswell CPU / well too another box with same motherboard stuff.
30nd of April, 2015
Finished a new LUbuntu 14.04 64 bit build yesterday. It works fine but it's too fat now and starting all over again today.
1st of May, 2015
Well ended up having issues with the new Intel HDA sound drivers on the LUbuntu build. Note that the motherboard passes the sound to the HDMI port, Optical port or analog port.
I was able to get the sound working but it was mainly related to adding the kitchen sink to the build in drivers which was too much. Historically I have not used the sound output on the new Linux build as I do not like the TTS default font. I am also just using an embedded XPe build for running speaker dot exe. Redid the build again to Ubuntu 64 bit / LTS. The sound drivers got updated right away. I then thinned out the build removing the stuff I didn't need. (well too using Ubuntu 14.04 / 64 server build would solve my issues except for the sound output). Homeseer is running fine in this manner. I also took the audio output and using a mixer blending the TTS with the older Homeseer 2 boxes running. Next though maybe trying a virtual box tiny build of W2003 for just the text to speech stuff running on the Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit build and comparing it to the Wine stuff. I did upgrade the memory on the box from 8 Gb to 16 Gb.
8th of May, 2015
1 - Installed virtual box on Buntu build
sudo apt-get install virtualbox
2 - Installed W2003 server VB
3 - Installed Neospeech voices
4 - Installed Homeseer 3 speaker dot exe
5 - Configured Speaker dot exe to connect to HS3 Pro running on Ubuntu
6 - Configured W2003 session to autostart with Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit
7 - tested client to work fine.
19th of August, 2015
1 - Installed Digi Anywhere USB drivers / Digi 8 Port Edgeport to VB
2 - Connected Digi 7 port power USB hub / Digi 8 Port Edgeport to Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit box.
3 - Tested remote Z-Wave plugin on RPi2 to Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit box to work fine (IE: RPi2 / Z-Wave + POE in attic)
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