HouseBot

Well.. I finally got rid of my old gaz guzzling power hungry PII 450. This old beast onky had 128 MB of Ram and 8 GB on the drive. The only thing it's been running for the past couple of years is Housebot.

What did it get replaced with?

Now this is the cool part! An HP t5700 "thin terminal"! The t5700 is a PIII 1.0 GHz that is running XPe... The "e" is for embedded... Pretty much a stripped down version of XP. The default memory on the t5700 is 256, but the one I have is upped to 512. The drive space is also 256 by default, but again I've upped it to 512. After installing HB I have about 200 MB of drive space and HB is happy running along doing it's thing. The drive is an IDE flash drive.

The device itself is about 1/2 the size of a laptop... And it has no fans! Not even on the CPU! It operates of 12vdc.

My basement is sooooo quite now!

It has media player, so I'm going to see if it has enough power to be my jukebox and HB server. I'll get an external USB drive and load all my songs onto to it. If not, I'll go and find another to be my mp3 server.

Tim

Nice work, I've considered something like this myself.

How did you get HB (or anything else for that matter) on there? I'm assuming through the local network to the "c" drive... Also, are you concerned about the limited number of writes you get with flash drives before they fail? I read that special consideration needs to be taken to eliminate the writes by killing the swap file, no logging, no temp files, etc. Most others I've encountered set up a mapped drive to another "normal" box somewhere on the LAN for temp/log files etc... Is that what you're doing or do you have another solution? Lastly, what do you do for I/O ports? My HB server has 4 full serial ports, two parallel ports, and 3 usb ports in use, I'd have some serious consolidation to consider a move to an embedded platform I suppose.

TIA,
Terry

The device supports bootable USB, so I actually downloaded the OS from the HP and put it on a bootable USB drive and re-imaged the terminal to ensure it was clean. That also means I could have put linux on it too! Or even w2k or anything else...

The other software (aka Housebot & VNC) I downloaded from the web since the thin terminal has IE on it. I pulled in my HB config backup from over the LAN.

I hadn't considered the write cycles for the flash drive... When it fails, it fails... I will replace it with either a small IDE drive or go 100% USB drive... Not as fast, but then again, I don't need blazing speed. However, I gather that most flash drives now have "wear-levelling" technology in them that will spread the writes over the entire chip. The default setup for the client has temp files written to a RAM-drive, so they will be lost upon reboot. In fact, thinking about it now, there is a write-filter on the flash-drive, so data can *not* be written without user consent. Moreso for virus protection I think, but I wonder if I can setup it up to automatically commit the changes every 5 minutes or so.

I'm still relatively light on IO ports. It has 4 USB, 1 serial and 1 parallel. I'm only using 2 serials, so I had to buy a USB to serial adapter for $20 at my local store. The terminal took the drivers for it no problem. If I need more ports, I cheapo-hub and more converters would suffice.

Tim

Timoh,

Are you still running this setup? I'd be curious to know if you still like it after running it several months. I'm still on the fence but have been looking at the HP t5720 lately.

TIA,
Terry

roussel:

If you are looking for an appliance/server set-up, you should check out the new mini-itx boards from intel:

http://www.logicsupply.com/products/d201gly2

Board is $77, 512MB RAM is $25, 512MB 40-pin IDE Flash Disk is $33. Just add a minimalist OS and a PSU (check out the PicoPSU) and you're good to go. The reviews of the board have been very good.

Osler

Still running great!

It's slowly accumulated more software... Some zip utilities & some com port tracing s/w. I have about 100MB left on my drive.

Most of my folders are compressed, but I left the Housebot folder uncompressed for performance.

The only weirdness I had with it was today. I took it offline for about 36 hours, and when it came back it re-mapped by USB serial adapter to a different com port. It was the first time it's done it. It has been power cycled before without doing this, so I don't know why it did it today.

My only complaint is that it's kinda sluggish over VNC. I'm not sure if it's a HP thing, display, or ??? That being said, I haven't tried optimizing it.

The parts Osler listed is pretty much what's in the HP terminals. I paid ~$200 for mine on ebay.

I don't run a remote on the device... Just the HB server.

My remote runs on an old Fujitsu Stylistic LT running win98. It's performance is OK... The biggest issue is I spin down the drive after about an hour, this yields A few seconds lag for the remote to wake up.

Tim

Wow, it's crazy how time flies, I had forgotten that this conversation was so long ago... I just picked up a t5720 on eBay for $145.00 so as soon as it arrives I'll be re-imaging and installing HB on it to be my main server. Can you send me the HP link you used to download the OS image? I searched around but couldn't find it.

Also, any extra install details that may be useful that's not mentioned above would be most appreciated. :)

EDIT: Nevermind about the link, I just found it: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/Te ... nvOID=1058

Still would love any helpful info though.

Thanks,
Terry

Wow time does fly!
And ironically enough, I haven't even been checking the Housebot forum for several months now, and for some reason decided to check it today.

I don't recall much... of installing my t5720. I seem to recall turning off the write-filter, otherwise it dismisses all changes on reboot. There is a light firewall that comes with it... I don't recall if I configured it or not, I would need to take a look. I don't run any AV on mine, but then again, I only ever surf to the cebotics website for updates. I probably turned off as many windows services as I could, as well as network protocols, etc.

Other than that, it remains rock solid. No crashes, unexpected boots, or anything. I am really happy with it.

I'm now debating if and how I should move off my Ocelot. Deciding whether to go Insteon or z-wave. What to do for IR (probably keep Ocelot) and IO (have run out of inputs).

Tim

How about one of these? Seller has a few of them for what looks like a good price.

WYSE J400 WT 941GXL Thin Client

I didn't see the processor specs (fast scan) but it should be fine as long as it's a x86-style processor. BTW, I replaced the flash drive in mine (above posts) with a notebook SSD harddrive and installed regular XP pro. XPe was nice but HP failed to include several components in the image that I needed for my installation.

Terry