Homeseer HS3 on Laptop?

[sachinsinbox]

[Uncle Michael]

Welcome to the HS board.
I ran HS on a laptop for years. It works fine, and as you say, it provides its own backup battery. As far as portability is concerned, I would expect that you will soon find reason to have a number of items wired into your HS PC, making it quite inconvenient to move. If you want zwave portability, using a Znet seems to me to obviate the need to move your HS PC for device pairing.

[Pete]

Welcome to the Homeseer forum sachinsinbox!!

There are a few folks here running Homeseer 3 on a laptop. There are no issues using a laptop that I have seen posted here on the forum.

There are many options relating to running Homeseer during a power failure.

That said here primary automation relates to lighting. If there is no electric then I have no lighting. Well unless I install a huge UPS and have a diesel / gas whole house 15Kw or so generator and have solar charging the batteries.

I do have my router (PFSense), switches (Managed and POE), Homeseer Box, NAS (X3), Kodi, Wintel servers, Linux Servers and WAP on UPS's. Security panel has it's own backup batteries.

There are also a couple of Homeseer users here running their stuff off the grid and using satellite for their Internet connectivity.

Homeseer ZNet is optimal (wired via a POE connection). That said Homeseer works with any Z-Wave stick today.

Here automate with X10, UPB, ZWave and Zigbee.

Homeseer is a software automation program on steroids today running fine on Wintel or Linux or a MAC. The automation engine is primo stuff.

Relating to controller transport (serial or USB or Network) here went to using one USB cable to a Digi 7 port Hub and two Digi 8 port serial Edgeports over 10 years ago with Homeseer 2. In the mix at the time were Digi USB Anywhere boxes and Quatech serial servers. Today you can DIY these type of ethernet connections with an RPi.

[sachinsinbox]

Thanks for the welcome and comments @Uncle Michael and @Pete.





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[Alexey]

I always used a laptop for my HS setup.
First it was Dell D600 and I even replaced its IDE drive with a Compact Flash 8Gb card. It was running stripped-down WinXP and was doing great.

Because it was almost 10 years old, CPU was running pretty hot and the battery was not holding the charge I replaced it with a fanless very cheap Acer laptop (bought it refurbished from Acer store for something like 200 dollars).
The only thing that I am missing from my old Dell is the COM port. On the Acer I had to use a COM to USB cable and it sometimes gives me hick-ups and for a second or two laptop looses connection to my 1-Wire controller. The connection recovers quickly so it is not a problem.

I also run Serviio media server on my Acer without any trans-coding, basically just hosting pictures and videos saved on an external hard drive.

In case I need to add a new Z-Wave device I just take the laptop with me, add and then place the machine back on the shelf (the Z-Wave controller is plugged into a USB port).

In my opinion, it is better solution than having a dedicated computer and a controller, unless you need reliable COM connections.

[jjason]

I was running on an HP Laptop and just migrated to a VM on VMware vSphere ESXi (free or paid versions both work) running on a 2012-vintage Mac Mini server edition.

Why did I move?
1. There was no way to completely disable the energy savings features in the laptop. Made for erratic performance.
2. I was having some issues running the laptop 24x7. Occasional slowdowns and glitches. Educated guess is cooling. Moving solved that issue.
3. Room has a UPS for my NAS, so I had capacity available for the Mac Mini.

End result is more consistent performance.

Hope this is useful!