Latest HomeTroller Zee Acting Up, Warped 8GB SD Card

[Pete]

Well here I put the SD card back into the Zee and started it up. I used the Homeseer search tool and found the Zee right away. Thing is; the browser GUI did not come up. I can ping the IP but not SSH to it. I left it alone for about 20 minutes and checked and no browser.

I am wondering if I have to open up the firewall / put it in a DMZ such that it chit chats on the internet before the GUI comes up? I didn't need to do that with my original Zee.

Got to see GUI only on Chrome after around 15 minutes. I did not get to see it in Firefox.

Registered it. For a bit I thought something was broken.

I mostly utilize Firefox and rarely utilize Chrome. That said shut down HS3 and updating the Zee OS such that maybe I could get HS3 to work with Firefox which is my preferred browser these days.

The above noted seeing that the Zee is running some 50% slower than my old one with no plugins enabled or scripts running which personally has me shutting it off and not using it.

[Phill]

You Guys have pretty much described my Zee (4Gb) experience since I started it using it about 7 months ago.

When it works its fine. However if I need to reboot for whatever reason, 50% of the time I end up with some kind of corruption on the SD card and either the OS won't even start or HS wont start. I've realized that using the 'System' menu commands to shutdown HS with the 2 minute default makes it worse so I always shutdown manually waiting for the Mono process to terminate before taking the OS down cleanly, this helps dramatically. I've 3 SD cards that I cycle through to the point that I normally set a restore going before shutting down the Zee in anticipation that the SD in the Zee will not boot.

As I say when it works its fine, but the managment is too much for me to live with. If we have any power issues then thats it I have to restore. My experience for the last 7 years on HS2 on an old laptop I never had any such issues.

So I'm out of here 8-) I'm going back to a laptop with HS3 running under Windows.

[NeverDie]

So I ordered a HomeTroller Zee, ACT TI103 X10 Controller and TrendNet USB to Serial Converter about 3 weeks ago to convert another customer from their old way of controlling their X10 devices to the new sleek way of doing it and having access to control it remotely. I did all the prep work in my office and tested it for 5 days to make sure everything was running smoothly. Yesterday I went to my customer's home to install and that's when all hell broke loose.

First off I noticed that The Hometroller Zee was running VERY laggy!! Thought maybe it's due to the 40 X10 devices or perhaps the customer's computer tech still didn't open up the ports on the Business Class Cisco Router. Some of the devices would turn on, but wouldn't turn off. Nor would any other devices respond. The lag increased, so I shutdown and powered back up. Each time the problem got worse and worse. Then the HomeTroller Zee wouldn't respond. Main device page just sat there "Page Refreshing" So, after 4 pain staking hours, I called it quit! At least their IT guy got my requested ports opened.

So after cursing the whole way back to my office, I powered up it back at my office. Got "Page Refreshing" and then nothing, page can't be displayed. Fed up with it, I brought it home to work on it. "Dedicated ain't I?" LOL..

Spent 5 more hours researching and powered up my backup Hometroller Zee and configured it with the same ACT TI103 and USB Serial converter. Preformed the latest update and worked fine. No lag what so ever. So shutdown my test unit and disconnected it. I then remembered, I had a backup Transcend SD HC 4GB card from the last hiccup earlier this year with the same setup. Plug it in and the HomeTroller Zee started right up. Granted I need to call in the morning and have them release the old S/N so I can register the unit.

Now, this is what gets interesting. After inspecting the old SD card which is a Transcend SD HC 8GB card, I noticed that card is warped/bent in the middle by the contacts. After researching this problem, I came across other Raspberry PI users complaining about this and how their PI's were acting. They were using Transcend cards.

I'll take a pic and post the article with my phone.

Nice post!

I purchased a SanDisk "Extreme" card for the speed rather than the physical properties, and at the time I remember wondering just who needed "temperature proof" and "shock proof" etc. that it was also advertising. It doesn't say "bend proof", but maybe a search will reveal a card that's more rigid and has greater strength against bending.... I doubt the issue is limited to just Pi's. If temperature turns out to be a factor in the bending, then maybe one of the "Extreme" cards might help. It's more a lead than a suggestion at this point.

[Bill Brower]

I'm sure nobody has overclocked the Pi and left it in the case