Installing HS3 Pi on a standard raspbian with Mono?

[tristpost]

I would like to run my HS3 Pi application on a fresh standard Raspbian (I want to install nano UPS that require some specific packages/versions to make work and also be able to update the operating system with the latest security patches etc. using the standard package manager).

What I intend to try is to tar up the install directory from the HomeSeer SD card image and then untar it on top of a standard Raspbian. I know that I need to install MONO (nowadays available as a package I believe).

My question is if anybody have tried this already and have some experiences if if it works or not and if it worked out notes about what other packages (except mono) that are needed?

[Jfree23]

I would like to run my HS3 Pi application on a fresh standard Raspbian (I want to install nano UPS that require some specific packages/versions to make work and also be able to update the operating system with the latest security patches etc. using the standard package manager).

What I intend to try is to tar up the install directory from the HomeSeer SD card image and then untar it on top of a standard Raspbian. I know that I need to install MONO (nowadays available as a package I believe).

My question is if anybody have tried this already and have some experiences if if it works or not and if it worked out notes about what other packages (except mono) that are needed?

Yes, I just did this successfully, check out the recent forum thread just below where you posted this one.

https://forums.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=187569

[tristpost]

Super - great info!

Did not see it - thanks for this excellent info!!!!

[MagnusSweden]

I am looking at doing the same thing but, as I understand it, only found a tread (actually several threads) about how to do your own installation of the full HS3 on the Pi not how to roll your own HS3Pi setup without using the provided SD card image and this is kind of confusing as this sub forum is supposed to be about the HS3Pi version of the product and not making the regular HS3 running on Pi or?!

I only use Z-WAVE, ENVISALINK and the Ring Doorbell plugin so no need for the full HS3 and therefore I went for the HS3Pi...

What I have tried so far are the following steps:

1. Install the HS3Pi image on a SD card, boot it on my Pi, enter my registration key, set up all my Z-wave stuff, events etc. Create a archive (tar) of the whole /usr/local/HomeSeer directory (and for good measure also the "system_password_changed" file found in the /home/homeseer directory) on a separate USB stick.
2. Install the latest lite version of Raspbian on a another SD card along with the other software I need (I use picoUPS to in the end hopefully get a more resilient HS3 setup).
3. Create a homeseer user (making sure to set 1001 as uid that the homeseer user has on the original HS3Pi image and in my tar).
4. Create the /usr/local/homeSeer directory and set owner to homeseer and group to root (maybe this step is not needed - tar should preserve the owner/group - but I did it to be sure)
5. Restore the tar to /usr/local/HomeSeer and the system_password_changed from the USB stick

After this HS3Pi seem to still work (I can add/remove devices, events work etc) but I still need to find a way to make HS3Pi to shutdown cleanly when the UPS software performs a orderly shutdown of the system :-(

I am also having some problems with the automated start of HS3Pi as the latest version of Rasbian no longer works very well with rc.local but prefers startup actions to be proper Linux services and runs rc.local in some emulated compatibility mode...

I just found the work zwolfpack has done to turn HS3 into a proper Linux service (sadly also for full HS3 runing on Rasbian and not the HS3Pi product) but it seems like I can use parts of it so that is my next thing to try...

[MagnusSweden]

I can now confirm that the zwolfpack service definition (developed for the HS3) also works for HS3Pi even though the whole installer does not!

Being able to start / stop HomeSeer as a proper Linux service provides so many advantages that I advice any Linux user to adopt it, to mention some:

1. I can now easily automate start/stop of HomeSeer from other programs/scripts. I am for instance using this to allow RaspiBackup to automatically stop HomeSeer while performing backups of my SD card and then start it again (this is needed to get a clean backup of the HomeSeer database).
2. When my USB Pico detects a long power outage it will initiate a orderly shutdown of the RaspberryPi and this will now cleanly shut down HomeSeer (as it is a Linux service) avoiding database/settings corruption etc.
3. No need to muck about with rc.local (that now is becoming depricated in Raspbian) to make HomeSeer start automatically!!!!!!!

To get all this working there are however sadly a lot of steps to perform (none of them really hard but all in all time consuming and tedious):

1. Download the HS3Pi SD card image that HomeSeer provides us.
2. Install it on a card and boot or mount it, on an existing Linux box (or a Pi), create a tar file of the /usr/local/HomeSeer directory and store the resulting archive on an mounted USB stick (could we at least please get this from HomeSeer as a complement to the image to avoid having to do these steps?!)
3. Prepare a Raspbian Lite SD card with your version of choice (I used the latest available) and boot it
4. In my case install all the stuff required to make USB Pico work (I never managed to get this working with the HomeSeer provided Linux image and since I had not created it myself it was too hard to debug the problems)
5. Create the homeseer user (make sure to get the user id of 1001 used in the home seer image - sudo adduser homeseer -uid 1001)
6. Install mono (sudo apt-get install mono-complete, sudo apt-get install mono-vbnc)
7. Mount the USB stick and restore the archive to /usr/local/HomeSeer
8. Download the super nice service definition as described in this post but rather than installing it as described there (this process only work with the full HS3 not HS3Pi) run "sudo make install-service". This will install the service definition.
9. You will now be able to start and stop HomeSeer with the commands "sudo service homeseer start" & "sudo service homeseer stop" and check the status with "sudo service homeseer staus" - fantastic improvement!
10. When you have verified that this works you can make HomeSeer start at every boot by just once executing "sudo systemctl enable homeseer"

Would it not be FANTASTIC if we all could get these features out of the box from HomeSeer and not having to perform all the steps - please HomeSeer, if you care about your customers, provide HS3Pi as a Raspbian package with a service definition included and a proper dependency on Mono - should take you at most a few days to develop...

[Atticka]

Would it not be FANTASTIC if we all could get these features out of the box from HomeSeer and not having to perform all the steps - please HomeSeer, if you care about your customers, provide HS3Pi as a Raspbian package with a service definition included and a proper dependency on Mono - should take you at most a few days to develop...

%100 this!