SPOCS / Blog: Recent posts

Well. SPOCS is still running. It is now the only machine in the original Penguin Farm four slot cage.
HomeSeer turned out to be a bit of a letdown. I even bought a new machine to run it on, but things kept breaking. For instance, one day the scripting broke. Just stopped working. Other issues popped up that were really troublesome.
So, I turned to Home Assistant. It is open source, so no cost. It supports the protocols I need. But seriously, their native detection scheme has a door contact being closed meaning the door is OPEN?! How illogical. Fortunately, some enterprising folks wrote an add-on that fixes that. HA is talking to Modbus TCP, Z-Wave (via the same USB stick I used for HomeSeer), and my Venstar thermostat flawlessly. HA even supports Node-red, so you can do flow-based scripting. I used it to read and scale temperature and humidity readings.
So, I build Penguin farm 2.0. It is a free-standing rack for three machines. SPARCL18 is running Home Assistant, and SPARCL11 has resumed duties as the house server. I have one spare slot for whatever. There are a few issues to be worked out. I strongly advise running your HA machine on a UPS. I moved the monster UPS from the old Penguin Farm to Farm 2.0, and put a small UPS on the SPOCS machine, which sits alone in the old Farm.
The problem with going to a pre-made package after running your own for more than 20 years, is you want certain things to be a certain way, and the people who wrote the pre-made system may have a different idea. For instance, I really did NOT want to learn YAML - but HA uses it for configuration files, so I had to go with the flow. I installed Node-red to avoid learning the scripting used for scaling values. I'm working on getting log data in the form I want. It's nice that HA gives you too much logging by default - and makes it easy to turn off what you don't want.
So, anyway, SPOCS is still running, after all these machines, after all this time.

After all these years, SPOCS is finally looking at the end of the trail. It's been ticking away, day after day, year after year, like a finely tuned bomb.
Unfortunately, we are moving to Z-Wave sensors, because wired sensors are not practical, especially when you are remodeling your home, and the better half hates wires. We looked at other solutions, and the most cost effective is Z-Wave. In addition, Z-Wave does not share wireless spectrum with any other service, so there are no interference issues.
So, we're moving to Homeseer version 4. It has many plugins to cover our needs, like history, Modbus, and Venstar (thermostat). We're running a test instance of HS4 on Linux machine SPARCL17 now. We are in the process of refurbishing SPARCL14, which is a dual core AMD APU, into a Ryzen powered machine to run HS4.
We are going to run a custom ESP32 based I/O block to pick up some of our basic I/O. We will use the ESP32 plugin for HS4 to do that.
It's been quite a ride, with SPOCS. I am proud of what we have accomplished. Thank you to the Linux community for your support. I learned may things Linux while developing SPOCS. I am looking forward to learning may more things in the future.
So, as the Traveling Willburys would say, it's the End Of The Line for SPOCS. It looks like the switchover date will occur in June, 2025, maybe later. We have some testing to do.
Safe travels to you all!