Maybe the time has finally come to do the media server thing

I've been keen on the idea of a media (primarily music) server for a long time, but the completely turd like control facilities have always been a show stopper. Mainly 'cos as I have a fair sized collection of classical music, the lack of ability to handle the distinction between composer, performer, orchestra, soloist etc. - at least without spending a fortune on Linn or other proprietary kit.

At one time I seriously considered a fully diy solution, but that was too big a commitment.

My most recent foray was with plex, but this still didn't solve the indexing problem.

Then yesterday I bumped into minimserver. This looked like the sort of answer I was looking for. It looked like it properly handles the indexing and access.

What I want to do is:

1. media on a headless server (probably a vm on my pet server)
2. control agents preferably on android
3. playback through windows or ubuntu pc's (or even android things)

Still early days, but things are looking promising so here is the log of my first steps.

Openhab on Raspberry Pi - its a bit slow

I have been hoping that if a waited for a while, the performance problems of Openhab on a Raspberry Pi would get sorted, but no such luck, so it might be time to get out the old wheel tapper's hammer and see what's going on.

Razberry: lets do temerature logging and a graph...

I've just updated to a recent 1.4 snapshot and added in HABmin to the config without any real difficulties, so time to see if I can persist the temperature data and do a graph I think.

Razberry: config cleanup and add temperature sensor

The very simple config last time had silly icons and didn't really do the right things, so the first thing is to clean up the config a bit. After that I'm aiming to get a temperature sensor on a fibaro universal sensor working

RaZberry: running as a service

Running as a service means openhab will automatically start when rpi starts up and will shut down when rpi shuts down, it can also be shutdown at any time from the console (for example, to run z-way to pick up new or changed device configurations).

This script is based on the one Victor Belov posted here changed thus:

1. directory and user names changed (ECLIPSEHOME, RUN_AS)
2. -Dgnu.io.rxtx.SerialPorts=/dev/ttyAMA0 added to DAEMON_ARGS
3. simple 3 generation log recycler

(Previously:

first steps

stripping down configuration

)

RaZberry: Stripping down the configuration

The demo config is good as a demo and as a simple howto, but I'd rather keep the config simple and add things into it as needed. This keeps logs and the UI simple.

Home Automation with z-wave on Raspberry pi using openhab - first steps

There are a few diversions on the road to running z-wave of RaspberryPi, so here are some notes on how I did a good working build using:

• Standard Raspberry Pi model B
• RaZberry board
• openhab home automation software