Repurpose Polisy Hardware After eisy Migration?

[gklimo]

I recently migrated from a Polisy Pro to eisy | home. Everything is working great.

Since I no longer use the Polisy for IoX, I'd like to repurpose the Polisy hardware by installing Debian. From what I can tell, Polisy uses PC Engines hardware.

I've found some reference information on how to install Debian on a PC Engines platform. It involves invoking installation commands over the serial port and a USB thumb drive containing Debian.

Unfortunately, I've been unsuccessful at communicating with the system over the serial port using Putty, SecureCRT, etc. I've tried a straight through RS232 cable, a null modem cable, every possible baud rate, etc. I've rebooted and reset the system many times without luck. Still no serial communications or prompt of any kind over my confirmed working PC based serial port.

I've since restored a previous mSATA SSD disk image I created prior to my attempts. Polisy is currently back to its original state and can be accessed on my network.

Has anybody been successful at repurposing Polisy hardware? If so, I'd appreciate pointing me in the right direction.

Thanks!

[Guy Lavoie]

I haven't tried that, but since the serial port is normally used for an Insteon PLM, then that port would not be enabled as a login port. Back in the old Unix system V days, the port would be enabled in /etc/inittab. This would be different in FreeBSD, looks like it's /etc/ttys. The serial port appears to be /dev/ttyu0

Look at this link to see how how to set this up. Scroll down to section 29.3.1

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/serialcomms/

Once you get that figured out, find the equivalent for the OS you want to install.

Edited February 23 by Guy Lavoie

[gklimo]

Guy, thanks for the suggestion and information.

I've been unsuccessful as of yet but continue to pursue as time permits. I'll update this post once I figure out what specifically needs to be done. I suspect others might want to repurpose their Polisy hardware as well.

[Guy Lavoie]

Some of us are keeping them as a spare, and test system. That's what I'm doing with the one I acquired used (I got it after I got my eisy). A Polisy is still capable of running the latest IoX version.

[landolfi]

5 hours ago, gklimo said:

Guy, thanks for the suggestion and information.

I've been unsuccessful as of yet but continue to pursue as time permits. I'll update this post once I figure out what specifically needs to be done. I suspect others might want to repurpose their Polisy hardware as well.

I too am interested in your findings. I use eISY for a few Insteon, X10, and ZWave devices but have no need for a backup. I would like to put the Polisy to work.