How do you format SD card to install HS3 RPi?

[Guest]

THANKS for the updated installation instructions in RED (aka Missing Link)...

I have been procrastinating a trial of HS for years to finally integrate my Elk M1, house-full of UPB light switches, pool pump, Echo/Googles, security cameras, etc.. all self-installed.

So I finally cracked open my sealed Raspberry Pi 2 I bought 18 months ago, and spent hours figuring out the download, SD card prep, and install process, foolishly thinking I had to install Linux first... never really using it before.

So after I finally loaded the correct version of HS3 Pi on my Pi...got past the lack of default / default for login access, I was looking at a full screen of text resembling my old days with DOS... and a command line...yikes!!! no interface... no plug-ins... no idea what I missed.

After another few hours of intermittent researching what I missed, I finally came across the comments in RED ... I presume submitted by Traction Tim... to take me to the next level....


"At this stage you will be logged in, but you will not see anything else on the Pi3 screen. From here on, the Pi3 can be used as a headless (i.e. no monitor) device.

6. From a networked pc, go to find.homeseer.com, and you should find all of your active Homeseer installations."


So Traction Tim...Thank You Sir , as well as all others providing support for "newbies", for providing the critical information I may have otherwise found somehow, as it ended a few hours of frustration.

Curious... where else would I have found that significant educational detail???

[Desert_AIP]

Thanks all again, especially Traction Tim.
Pete, good to "see" a familiar face. :-)

I don't know why, but I had to attempt the Omni Plugin download over half a dozen times, one finally took. I don't know if I held my lower lip differently or what allowed the install to go that time.
I had to enter the second half of the crypto key about another half dozen times to connect the plugin. It kept dropping that element out of the config menu. It finally took.

All of my Omni info is now imported. Whew!

I'm up on a static IP address with a wireless connection.
So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

I'm excited to play with Homeseer and my Omni system.

I've been tinkering with the RPi and integrating several online tutorials together to get the effect I want. Wemo emulation/Alexa voice commands, CEC communications, GPIO relay control, CCTV display, etc.

One of the largest missing elements this far was to be able to easily send commands and get info to/from the Omni over the network. Reading the Omni-link docs gave me seizures.

To date I've been using a kludge of passing unused UPB Links to the Omni to trigger actions. And have been toying with hooking up a pi to an empty serial port to use the HAI Triggers in a similar hard code fashion.

I'm hoping with the Homeseer integration I'll be able to avoid that pain.

I'll play with it most of the winter and will likely be posting a lot of newb questions. Thanks for the tip of searching this forum through Google, that helped find some other relevant threads.

This venture also inspired me to update the interface on my 5.7e touchscreens and dabble with HSTouch and a larger format Android tablet and my phone.

Thanks again

[Pete]

Welcome to the Homeseer forum Desert_AI!

The Omni plugin is working well these days.

Note that your Zee2 Homeseer 3 license will work on any linux device with mono running.

Homeseer 3 is just a directory.

Here moving from the Zee 1 to Zee 2 created my customized RPi2 Wheezy build for running Homeseer.

Stuff like moving the HomeSeer default directory from

/usr/local/HomeSeer to /HomeSeer

This so I wouldn't have to type much for SSH.

Here too the microSD card that I use is a 16Gb from the stock 8Gb card.

You being familiar with the RPi Wheezy or Jessie lite builds might want to customize your Homeseer 3 build on your Pi.

Homeseer 3 runs fine using wireless. I would suggest though using the ethernet interface. Configurations here use POE connected RPi's.

Defaulted here to using an PiFace RTC shim for time.

The RPi can do all sorts of stuff...some projects that I am working on are:

1 - NOAA satellite SD Radio map downloading using an RPi and SDRadio.
2 - installation of KODI for my car pcs (in two cars) using the RPi based customized KODI with a little side program that talks to the bus of the vehicle.

The Omni Plugin talks to the units connected to the OmniPro 2 panel similar to the Omnitouch screen.

Here have X10, UPB, Zigbee and ZWave PIMs connected to the OmniPro 2 panel. Primary lighting is UPB. Christmas lighting is X10. Tinker with Zigbee and ZWave devices.

Thinking your Zee2 came with a ZWave controller. Adding UPB is easy. You can even build an RPi with just a UPB controller connected to it and use ser2net to get the Zee2 to talk to it. There are two plugins for UPB here on the forum. Here talk UPB via the OmniPro and Homeseer 3 mothership.

I have been able to replicate the Homeseer ZWave connected network over to the Leviton VRCOP and Samsung Smartthings hub.

You can get very creative with HSDesigner and Omni centric touch screens. Here are two that I am playing with.





Do you have the OmniTouch designer program?

Here have never touched my OmniTouch 5.7e screens and never have purchased the Omnitouch Android screens.

[Desert_AIP]

Pete, Thanks.

I will permanently install the RPi with a hardwire LAN. It's convenient to use the wireless to do the initial work if I need access to the box. I need to set up SSH for it, thanks for the reminder!

The RTC hat is an excellent tip!

I bought the UPB plugin, DirecTV, Omni and the HSTouch Designer.
I have a spare PIM and another GPIO serial TTL board I can use for the plugin.

My Omni Pro has UPB and Zigbee attached. I don't have any ZWave in the house, but am open to expanding into that realm if I need to.

I've been working outside all Summer and my HA efforts have stagnated. Now that it's winter this will give me a whole new arena to explore.

I like that Omnistat graphic interface.

Thanks again.

[Desert_AIP]

Success!

I got Homeseer loaded on an RPi 3,loaded the Omni plugin.
Spent about half an hour naming rooms and devices.
Told Alexa to discover my devices.
She imported over 120 items.

Lights, thermostats, flags, outputs, wow.

I haven't tried everything yet.

The light and thermostat control works very well and very fast.
Individual light control, on, off, dim - works perfectly.
Thermostat control, endpoints, etc. - works perfectly.

Need to test scenes, groups and other devices, but this is very promising. Much easier than the hard coding I was doing. I can see wanting to use the WeMo emulation in Some sod it if cases, like having multiple names for the same thing. Did a test and both HomeSeer and the WeMo emulation play together with Alexa. Running on separate RPis.

This is very exciting!

That's all through the API, haven't tested the other skill yet.

[Pete]

Good news Desert_AI!

The PiFace RTC will provide time to your RPi's before an Internet connection.

With your spare ZWave GPIO card you can install it in another RPi and do ser2net to connect it to your Homeseer 3 RPi. I have mine here in the attic connected via POE.

Homeseer has no issues with this connection. Today too you can add a Zigbee GPIO card in your RPi running Homeseer and do Zigbee.

You can also utilize Microsoft SAPI voices installing HS speaker.exe on any windows computer for Homeseer use and introduce the use of a Microsoft Kinect and have Cortana instruct Alexa. (turning her on or off).

[Desert_AIP]

After playing with the Alexa commands most of the day,it appears my WeMo emulation will be a better avenue for voice control of UPB links.

Individual unit control works great through HomeSeer.

Using groups as a substitute for links, the Echo sends commands to each device in turn. So groups of lights activate and deactivate in a progressive manner.

But I can hard code links into the WeMo scripts I'm using to send links and activate simultaneously.

Also, with the WeMo I can have multiple names for the same devices or links, and I can send channel commands to multi channel devices.

So this appears to facilitate most of what I want to do with the Echo through HomeSeer, and the odd ball things I can do with the second RPi and the WeMo emulation.

That saves me a LOT of coding and the two live happily together.
Very flexible system.

[Traction Tim]

SDXC versus SDHC ?

Hi all,

Regarding Desert_AIP's original problem with formatting his 64GB card, I noticed this statement on techmoan.com which may be relevant:

A lot of HD cameras will not work properly with cards larger than 32GB (cards over 32GB are usually SDXC rather than the SDHC standard used by 32GB cards. SDXC cards use the ex-FAT system rather than FAT32 - in short they are a different standard). - so don't just buy the biggest card you can afford - read the specs in the manual to see what it accepts.

So, do the Homeseer HS3 Pi3 instructions also need to be updated to state 32GB SDHC max ?

Oh, and the HS3 Rpi3 failure to correctly set up a static IP address failed here too. **Linux Newbie alert** How DO I manually set the static IP for the RPi3 ? It's ended up with an address in the middle of my deliberately small DHCP window....

[Pete]

Here have upgraded from 16Gb microsd cards to now 32Gb microsd cards.

So, do the Homeseer HS3 Pi3 instructions also need to be updated to state 32GB SDHC max ?

Homeseer 3 and the size of microsd cards have nothing to do with each other.

The Zee2 comes with a 8 Gb card which is typically more than you need. The original zee came with a 4 Gb sd card.

I only went from 16Gb to 32Gb cards cuz they were easier to find.

The ideal size is a 16Gb card....mostly because it is easier to get an image from a 16Gb card then it is from a 32Gb card. Note here store these images to my NAS box which Tb's in size.

Note that the above is only related to the RPi. Relating to the new crop of HD IP cameras with micro SD cards that is different and relates to the embedded Unique OS in these cameras and the ability to rw to large capacity micro SD cards which has nothing to do with the RPi as there embedded Linux OS is totally different than the RPi's OS.

BTW old standards SD cards for the RPi were up to 16Gb.

Way back folks started to utilize 32 Gb SD cards with the RPI and did have problems.

Note that these issues related to the RPi OS of Wheezy, Jessie or Stretch. Nothing to do with Homeseer.

The OS's were not originally made to deal with large capacity SD cards cuz they did not exist or just too expensive to use.

Relating to CCTV IP HD cameras with microSD cards.

Most if not all of the firmware / OS on these cameras is proprietary such that they are all unique and it depends on the OS of the specific mfg and camera.

[Traction Tim]

Hi Pete,

With reference to the original post:

"Error resizing existing FAT partition"
"No Implementation: GNU Partition cannot resize this partition to this size."
"We're working on it!"

I was thinking more along the lines that the 64GB SDXC card forced the OP to have an ex-fat formatted card, which then perhaps couldn't be partitioned by the HS3 RPi3 installation script which was expecting to find a FAT32 card. This line of thought was driven by the fact that we have very specific instructions on how to format the card before HS3 Pi3 installation can start.

Still just a guess though

[Pete]

Yeah original boot fat partition was a fat16 which had limitions way back. This is similar to an EFI boot parition. All of this stuff though comes from a sort of limited tiny bios called the U-Boot which is very common in embedded firmware systems.

So the boot partition is limited in size because it is a Fat32 / Fat16 partition. The work partition is an EXT partition which can be larger. You can though just create it as a 8 or 16Gb partition OS then using command line or linux GUI tools (gparted) expand the partition to 64Gb maybe. Such that you can do this probably editing the HS3 create boot script.

My touch tabletop tablets ran the entire OS on a 1Gb eMMC partition from a tiny EFI boot partition. Getting the EFI boot bios to recognize an SSD drive that was 16Gb took me to rewriting over the EFI boot with an older style '86 boot bios.

Way back in the early days of DOS there were limitations on the size of a hard drive and what was recognized.

[Krumpy]

Dumb question... Is the HSZ2 image supposed to have HS autostart? I have loaded the image onto my PI2 and it doesn't seem to autostart HS upon boot up.

Can not access it via the web interface, nor does TOP show any of the EXE's running.

Something is odd here. Maybe its me.

[Pete]

It's supposed to be in the /ect/rc.local file at the bottom.

It it isn't there just edit the file and put it there.

Other autostart options are to utilize cron or create a systemd autostart file.

Rich has mentioned the use of Stretch for the new Zee2 image in the near future.

[turbobob924]

Followingh with great interest

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