Well the good new is that HG looks promising with its transition to the Net Core 3 environment. Code appears to be a lot tighter and once the correct environment is setup for Linux users (Raspbian or Raspberry Pi OS as it’s known now) in my case, the improvement is very noticeable.
The new UI built around Angular is certainly a welcome addition. It still has limited functionality but it’s definitely getting there. Of course the old familiar UI is still in use for those that need it while this transition is in progress.
For those who were championing the transition to Netcore this is an opportunity to test HG in this environment.
Alpha testing is shortly coming to a conclusion. Unfortunately not many experienced users opted to partake in this phase of testing but it’s still not too late to do so.
Full details here. You’ll need to navigate down the page quite a bit to find the install instructions https://github.com/genielabs/HomeGenie/discussions/436
Since Gene removed the discussions section on the HG github page. I’ve seen next to no interest in this. I’m wondering if anyone is still playing with this?
Netcore requires a pi 3 B+ or newer board to install so anyone using a older pi can’t try this.
This may be a reason to upgrade to a newer pi.
It should be noted that these newer boards can run a 64 bit OS that can take full advantage of the hardware. A 64bit version of the raspbian Buster OS was released Feb 2 2022. So it maybe worth testing Netcore HG using it. Performace most likely won’t be very noticable unless your using a pi 4 with 4 or more mega of mem.
You have to understand why this forum exists in the first place. Illogical decision processes made by the author of HG took down a perfectly functioning forum back in 2017. Against all advice and offers from others to continue it he decided to cease operations and declare HG a finished product disregarding all the effort inputted from experienced contributors.
Thankfully Alex stepped up to fill the gap and created this forum. Unfortunately in the meantime the likes of Home Assistant overtook the market as the dominant go to home automation application.
HG now attracts only a trickle of interest and has received very little attention from the author by way of new features. That’s his prerogative but he can’t expect users to climb on board when they can get what they want elsewhere. Of course you are free to fork the project and adapt and improve on it for your own uses as many have done so far.
Personally my only interest in HG these days is its ability to handle X10. Outside of that all my home automation needs are handled elsewhere. This does not cut it for other users are they are way beyond that.
We asked him to look towards Net Core a number of years back and he only got around to it recently. Unfortunately there was very little desire to test his offering as can be seen from the feedback on his GitHub so effectively he missed the bus on that one.
I’m happy enough to continue with HG in its current format up to V19. I definitely won’t be running it on a Pi4. Why incur additional costs running a faster processor with more heat generated when it can happily run on older boards.
As for the latest offering on GitHub which is now nearly one year old I’ll pass on that until I see something of interest to me.
My main interest in HG is also for X10 and if I remember right that was functioning very well with the last alfa release.
Sadly my x10 setups were configured with pi zeroW boards mounted into a moded CM15A case. The the zero w couldn’t handle core and my pi 3b+ was configured for another project which only allowed be to briefly test new releases.
I now have a new zeroW 2 board which will handle Core. I’ll be swapping out one of my zeroW boards inside a CM15A with this new board.
My issues with the alfa builds was mainly the new UI not the old one and I rarely open the HG web interface except to view my web cams.
Once my swap is done I’ll load a new SD card with the 64bit Rasberry Bullseye OS and core. (I have a few other things that run on core) I’ll run the last core HG build on it at least till I have a issue I can’t resolve. 