Correct installation instructions for Raspberry Pi3

[concordseer]

Works just fine on Stretch. That's my setup. From start with a bare SD card to fully up and running on HS3 Pro took just over two hours on a Raspberry Pi 3.

[Pete]

Baby steps....means don't rush...take your time...

Yes relating to a new build originally here downloaded the Homeseer posted download for the Zee2. Wrote it to an SD card and copied the Homeseer directory to another media.

I am not sure that the updates to the Zee2 contain the whole HS3 Lite stuff to start from scratch. You can try to see if it works.

For a transfer from an old build to a new build only concern is the update of mono 3.28 to most current version of mono and the loss of triggers.

[Jfree23]

I'm a slow and pretty methodical engineer, so I always take lots of time

Thanks so much to so many on these forums; no way to get here without the many tips and guiding points, code fragments, etc.

I succeeded! Now up and running HS3Pi on my Stretch-Lite RPi3!

I've set up many RPi's so Peter's install instructions were easy to follow.

Built new Stretch Lite SD card. 2 things maybe useful for others:
1. After loading the RPI image, with SD still in your PC, create an empty file named "ssh" (no extension) in the /boot directory of the SD (this dir is visible in Windows). Notepad works if you rename it, or touch. This enables SSH after initial boot, no need for HDMI monitor and keyboard at all.
2. Create or copy a good wpa-supplicant.conf file with your WiFi info, from another RPI or you can type it in, into /boot. The system will copy that file into /etc/wpa-supplicant so you will be able to access the RPI via WiFi after first boot. No ethernet cable needed.

Now you can put the new SD card into the target Pi and boot up, connect via SSH on WiFi, do update/upgrade, raspi-config, etc.

I ended up installing mono-runtime, mono-vbnc, mono-xsp4, latest version from mono site 5.4.1.6. System actually came up without xsp4, but with an error for a missing dll. xsp4 installed that missing file, along with ~ 200MB of other stuff. Had to install dirmngr first to install mono repository key.

Not sure if needed, but created a homeseer user in homeseer group, and gave it sudo rights, as that is how the original HS3Pi was set up. Found key and key.db files in /home/homeseer, copied those to same place new in new build, don't know if needed or what they do.

Then I shut down my original HS3 and made a tar file of /usr/local/HomeSeer tree, which was the original HS3Pi HS root. Copied that to the new Stretch setup (I used Bitvise SFTP), untarred to /usr/local to create the same structure and permissions as the original.

That was pretty much it, maybe did a few things I forgot. HS3 could be started from an SSH session, manually, using ./go. Looking good.

Then used the excellent forum How-To on automatically starting HS3 in Linux with systemctl, copied the homeseer.service and stop_homeseer.sh scripts to /etc/systemd/system and /usr/local/HomeSeer, enabled with systemctl, and HS3 now starts on boot! Logs are all clean, no errors or warnings, all seems to work.

Thanks again to all....

[Pete]

Good news!!!

Yeah here too change the pi password.

For Mono only install Mono-complete and mono-vbnc. Way long time ago would install xsp4.

[racerfern]

Thanks for the detailed instructions. Thanks to @Pete, @bdickhaus and others, I'm up and running.

[Brady]

One alternate way to get up and running on a Raspberry Pi w/ either the standard or pro license...

I'm not 100% sure if this is "allowed"... but I took the official HomeSeer Raspberry Pi image, loaded it up on an SD card... got it running on the pi, changed the system password, ssh'd in to the pi, went to /usr/local/HomeSeer/ then did a wget on the normal linux install and installed it over the normal pi installation.

Now I seem to have a easy ready built pi image with all the dependencies with a HS3 standard license installed on it.

I already owned HS3 standard and I'm trying to move from Windows VM to a pi. Didn't want to just throw away my license and buy a new pi license.

[Timon]

I've been running Standard on a RPi via the console for a while. I decided it was time to let the Pi boot into HomeSeer. At that post all hell broke loose.

Here are the commands I understand you need to use.

HomeSeer can be started by cd HomeSeer followed by sudo ./go , but this only runs HomeSeer while the SSH console session is active.

Better is to run the heart of the go script in the background without logging:
sudo mono HomeSeer/HSConsole.exe &sudo mono /home/pi/HomeSeer/HSConsole.exe &

During testing I've been using the "cd HomeSeer" followed by "./go" and all was working as it should.

I then switched and setup /etc/rc.local with "sudo mono /home/pi/HomeSeer/HSConsole.exe &" so HS3 would autostart but then I started getting compiler errors in PHLocate and one of my scripts which reads the CPU temp.

I then tried running "sudo mono HomeSeer/HSConsole.exe &" from the command line while in the pi directory and I still got compiler errors.

So my last try was to make a copy of the go script, called gob, then change the line that starts HS3 to "sudo mono HSConsole.exe &" then followed the sequence "cd HomeSeer" followed by "./gob" and everything seems to work. However I'm still getting messages logged to the console but if I remember correctly adding "2&>1 >/dev/null" will solve that minor issue.

Is there something I'm missing that I need to add to rc.local to get hs3 to start correctly when the Pi is booted so I don't get a bunch of compiler errors?

[phillb]

5 Plugins Only?

One alternate way to get up and running on a Raspberry Pi w/ either the standard or pro license...

I'm not 100% sure if this is "allowed"... but I took the official HomeSeer Raspberry Pi image, loaded it up on an SD card... got it running on the pi, changed the system password, ssh'd in to the pi, went to /usr/local/HomeSeer/ then did a wget on the normal linux install and installed it over the normal pi installation.

Now I seem to have a easy ready built pi image with all the dependencies with a HS3 standard license installed on it.

I already owned HS3 standard and I'm trying to move from Windows VM to a pi. Didn't want to just throw away my license and buy a new pi license.

So I have just started playing with the pi with the intention of moving off windows and wanted to move to HS3 pi and was dissapointed with the 5 plug in restriction. I was about to give up until I found this thread. The std linux installation on the Pi, does it limit the plugin count?

Why do HS limit the plugin count anyways, commercial reasons or performance reasons does anyone know?

Thanks to all contributors to this thread its gonna save me a whole bunch of time I think

[Timon]

[Timon]

[Michael McSharry]

I put a post in the how-to forum for installing HS3 on Odroid which is the same as Raspberry Pi. It covers startup and shutdown using systemctl which is the more modern way than with rc.local. In my case I am sensitive to lifetime writes on SD so included running from SSD.

[zwolfpack]

The pi version has this in /etc/rc.local

sudo /usr/local/HomeSeer/autostart_hs &
echo "HomeSeer is starting..."

(It doesn't need the preceding 'sudo', since root is already running /etc/rc.local. All the sudo's in that file are worthless).

The autostart_hs file contains

#!/bin/sh
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
cd /usr/local/HomeSeer
mono HSConsole.exe

If you want to redirect all output to the bitbucket, add >/dev/null 2>&1 after a command. The order of these clauses is important; if they are switched only standard out (not error out) is redirected.

[Timon]

The pi version has this in /etc/rc.local

sudo /usr/local/HomeSeer/autostart_hs &
echo "HomeSeer is starting..."

(It doesn't need the preceding 'sudo', since root is already running /etc/rc.local. All the sudo's in that file are worthless).

The autostart_hs file contains

#!/bin/sh
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
cd /usr/local/HomeSeer
mono HSConsole.exe

If you want to redirect all output to the bitbucket, add >/dev/null 2>&1 after a command. The order of these clauses is important; if they are switched only standard out (not error out) is redirected.

Facepalm, I forgot the darn change directory command.

[Timon]

I put a post in the how-to forum for installing HS3 on Odroid which is the same as Raspberry Pi. It covers startup and shutdown using systemctl which is the more modern way than with rc.local. In my case I am sensitive to lifetime writes on SD so included running from SSD.

I'm going to check this out later when I move everything to a Rock64. I like the idea that HS will shutdown gracefully when the OS needs to shutdown rather using the HS3 webpage.

Currently my biggest complaint running Standard on the pi is the amount of time it takes to open event groups. Sometimes it can take a full minute just to get to the point where I can open an actual event to edit it. Same goes for copying events it's extremely slow. Actual daily operations seem to be quite responsive.

Hopefully that will be much faster on the Rock64 with 4GB of ram and running in 64 bit mode.

[concordseer]

I'm going to check this out later when I move everything to a Rock64. I like the idea that HS will shutdown gracefully when the OS needs to shutdown rather using the HS3 webpage.

Currently my biggest complaint running Standard on the pi is the amount of time it takes to open event groups. Sometimes it can take a full minute just to get to the point where I can open an actual event to edit it. Same goes for copying events it's extremely slow. Actual daily operations seem to be quite responsive.

Hopefully that will be much faster on the Rock64 with 4GB of ram and running in 64 bit mode.

Choose you OS version on your Rock64 wisely. A lot of instability and lack of peripheral support in various versions. Personally I use the Rock64 Armbian OS from the armbian.com project.