ultra small pc's

[Steve Q]

Steve,



I have read with great interest your posts regarding the 3050. My old Dell 4400 tower finally completely bit the dust after faltering for the last year or so. I've moved to another old tower for now, but it's time for a new box, and the idea of the 3050 is quite intriguing.



So, why the 2nd unit?



Mike

Over many years, my approach to home automation has changed. I started with a few X10 devices and 16 button controller. Over the next 10 years I added more capability and my system grew into a dedicated Home automation XP tower PC running HS2. Everything worked well and for a 2-3 year period I left the system alone. About 4 years my computer crashed and I could not restore it from my backup disks. So I spent a year getting it up and running again. It was a painful process. During that time XP was discontinued and HS3 was announced. Realizing that XP was dead, I decided to migrate to HS3 and I setup another desktop Win 7 machine to run HS3. I moved my Z-wave stuff to HS3, but I had a lot of hardware that used RS232 serial interfaces. New computers do not have serial ports. Initially, HS3 was not very stable and was constantly being updated. I found that I was restarting HS3 almost daily. That led to a 3rd home automation low power netbook computer to see if it could run HS3. Then another Dell laptop computer looked promising so I set it up to run my IP security cameras and HS3. By the end of 2015, I was spending several hours per day just keeping all this stuff running. But I also learned that I would never be able to return to a single computer running everything.

When Windows 10 arrived, I upgraded my Dell desktop and I saw an immediate improvement in the stability of that computer.

The cost, form factor, Win 10, and low power usage of the Dell3050 convinced me to try it. I started running HS3 on it in 3 months ago and it has worked extremely well.

My strategy now is to have multiple small home automation computers with each one dedicated to certain activities. So I have purchased another Dell3050 and I will soon use it to control my HVAC system.

Steve Q



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[Pete]

Here running my irrigation software (mcsSprinklers) on an old Seagate Dockstar in mono with direct serial connections to the two Rain8Nets.

It runs by itself or can be managed from the mothership today. I include the HSTouch screen interface in my touch builds. It all fits inside of the old Rainbird irrigation controller box. I do not really remote control it except for checking during seasonal turn up or shut down. Thinking now it has been like this for more than 3 years and before Homeseer 3. (it was all about running mcsSprinklers in Mono / Linux at the time). ALL of the dependencies to run it are local except for UV numbers. That said I have historically utilized UV numbers locally. (making a doo what UV guesstimater 1-wire device).

[Mike Johnson]

It sounds very promising. My system is fairly simple, so I may have to give the i3050 a try...

Thanks,
Mike

[Uncle Michael]

On the other TVs, I'm running the Nvidia Shield TV, which I'm really enjoying. I use the SPMC fork of Kodi and get high-def audio (TrueHD, DTS-HD) and the box works quite well.

I've been looking for something that will interface to Sling TV. I thought that PlayOn did, but it doesn't. They claim the log-on and web player are "incompatible". I'd love to find a way to time shift Sling-TV content, but have not found a path yet.