Ease my fear... Home Assistant on eisy

[carealtor]

Very seriously considering upgrading from Polisy to eisy and installing Home Assistant.  My fear is I mess something up and the IoX portion gets corrupted.  Hypothetically, if this were to happen, is there some sort of reset on the eisy that will put it back to "out of the box" status?

[paulbates]

Here's my FWIW;

I've watched and studied ha from afar. So far not enough value to offset the learning curve of either ha itself, or the platform to run it on

I came to isy from homeseer 10 years ago to focus on home automation and not server care and feeding. With the early node servers, it brought that back in the form of the pi and raspbian. I was glad when I got the eisy and no more unix boxes to learn, update.

For me ha brings back os/servers several fold; not only learning some freebsd but also a vm environment to run ha on. I'm retired now and doing a lot of travel; I would worry about a few years down the road when a drive (or something) gives out, and I have to remember how to rebuild the whole thing vs restore my last iox backup and move along.

I have a lightly used, always on home office use PC that has 8 cores and 24gb of RAM. If I do something with ha, I'll start there and not risk a lot of progress I've made in 10 months of setting up my eisy... and that thought had been floating there for months and I've found other ways to enjoy my time

[DennisC]

19 hours ago, carealtor said:

is there some sort of reset on the eisy that will put it back to "out of the box" status?

Yes, the front mounted multifunction button does different things depending on how many times it is pressed. Check the user guide from the wiki for details.

[carealtor]

Doh!  I always forget about the Wiki.  Thanks @DennisC

[Geddy]

@carealtor I'm in the same camp as @paulbates. I tried HA a couple of years ago (before HA could run on the eisy). I found it overtaxing for my needs. I've got a very simple setup and the eisy handles everything just fine. Add in the few plugins I run everything is simple and automated just the way we want/need it for our household. 

One thing I have seen mentioned on the forums is the intense effort to get HA setup on the eisy and keep both systems running independently. It mostly depends on your tech abilities. I would probably suggest to keep them on separate devices. Sure, there are a lot on here that have "mad tech skills" that can handle them on the same device, and that's great....for them. I'm want to underscore the comment from @paulbates about being a few years down the road and having to "rebuild" everything. Heck, for me it could be as short as a few months and I'd forget what I did to setup things. 

No one answer will get you what you need, but if you're tech savvy and wanting to try it go for it. If not, I'd suggest using a different device for the HA install. There's a lively thread discussing those options in this same sub-forum area. 

[carealtor]

Thanks for this @Geddy

This is exactly my concern...  I don't know if I trust my tech abilities to take this on.  I certainly would not be able to troubleshoot if anything goes wrong.  Hence my initial question about there being a factory reset on eisy.  I have very limited space in my "technology box" in the master bedroom closet.  The idea of combing IoX and HA into one smallish box has a big appeal to me.

I already have HA running on an always on Windows 10 desktop in another room via a VM (VirtualBox), but wanting to move off it.  It works great, but I just don't like realizing that it isn't running because Windows did an update and is waiting for me to log in again.  I use Polisy for all my automation duties.  I use HA for it's pretty interface.

[brians]

If the only reason is to install Home Assistant, I don't believe the EISY would be the best experience. Instead buy an inexpensive PC for $50-$100 and install HA on it. Install the ISY integration and connect it to your Polisy.

What we really need is IoX to be able to run in a VM such as Proxmox, but that will probably never happen but I can still wish...  I would pay UDI for a license to do this... just a light version that supports Insteon only via USB PLM, with minimal programs, no node servers, z-wave, zmatter etc.

[carealtor]

17 hours ago, brians said:

If the only reason is to install Home Assistant, I don't believe the EISY would be the best experience. Instead buy an inexpensive PC for $50-$100 and install HA on it. Install the ISY integration and connect it to your Polisy.

Well, that is certainly the other option I've been toying with.  Moving my HA from one VM to another doesn't seem like accomplishing much...  EXCEPT, I wouldn't have to deal with my host machine updating and rebooting without me know it.  That, and having one less box to find space for.