Energie zuinige PC voor Homeseer

[Rutger]

My first PC was the Acer X3810, and that was consuming minimal 70-80Watt. That was in my opinion too much for home automation at 24/7.
I used this PC also to download/par/rar and try too look some movies via hdmi on tv. All actions at the same time wasn't running smoothly.
I bought a seperate media player from WD. And the downloads will be done on my notebook. A new home automation pc was neccessary because of the power consumption:

My second an previous mini-PC was the Zotac Zbox AD02, with dual atom 1.6 Ghz and Win7 HP with 4GB of RAM and OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SSD.
Here the cpu usage was minimal 80%, probably when motion is triggered (= save jpg+movies), around 90% or more, so less 'cpu resources' for other services.
Here the energy consumption was at night around 14 Watt and during the daytime 16-17 Watt, quiet nice!
Blue Iris setup was on 320x240. All motion triggering is done in Blue Iris. No setting on the cameras, I use only the stream.
I used this site to strip BlueIris and tried to get the lowest cpu usage: http://sadik.net/DIYProjects/tag/blue-iris/

Now with my new Zotax Zbox ID88 with Core-i3 and max 2.8 Ghz, Win8 Pro, I used almost the same software setup, also with the same OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SSD.
My Blue Iris setup is like:
- 2x Foscam (1 dome is a clone) IP camera's, both with IR leds but without IR-cut filter.
- Now both are recorded on 640x320.
- 25 fps
- Motion triggering is still ON, where 1 dome has two time scheduled profiles.
- At the moment I use the standard text overlay with date and time. In the previous setup there was no text overlay.
- Record format in standard AVI, but are testing with other codecs like XVID/MPEG4: quality 100%, keyframe 30. I don't know wat is the 'best' with less cpu usage.
- When triggering, a jpg will be posted to some folder.
- Webcast is enabled, 85% quality
- And last but not least, a script is running while triggering, so Homeseer can trigger virtual devices and events.

With both camera's enabled, the cpu usage is 10-12%, when no motion is triggered. So it could be more when triggering is ON, but that are short moments.
The CPU is running at this moment below 2.0 Ghz.
At the moment with 1 camera enabled (the garden cam is disabled because my gardendoor is open for xx time), BlueIris take 3,2% CPU, 107MB and 5,1Mbps on LAN.
Plugwise shows: On 19,00W (2,18kWh) 0,21kWh
Btw: When I'm at home the Airplay speakers are on and used for music and speak commands.

[Bastiaan]

Thanks Rutger, it seems a great improvement and worth the investment. Guess what is on my wish list now....
I never looked at or tested the HS integration with Blueiris but that sounds very useful.
To keep this thread clean I will post a message in the HS forum and ask about your setup.
I have only an additional 3CX voip system also on the box but that is not adding much to the cpu use.
Time to update my server too.
Thanks for the inspiration.

[Bastiaan]

Hi Rutger, finally got my ZOTAC too. (thanks PostNL for delaying the delivery with a week). 8GB mem and Samsung 830 256gb SSD
With the powersettings in W8 switched to 'balanced' with some tweaking (wifi off) I get the same 19 Watts idle and jumps up to max 23 when pushed by Blue iris. Most of the time it runs this 19 watts so a big improvement in noise and electricity. Thanks for the tip.

[Wim2008]

Hello Rutger,

Where did you bought the Zotac Zbox ID88 ?

B.R. Wim

[Bastiaan]

http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/334347/z ... -id88.html

[Wim2008]

Bedankt.

[Bastiaan]

Vergeet niet dat je bij deze versie dus nog (Notebook) geheugen en (notebook) HD nodig hebt. Het is de kale versie. De PLUS versie komt compleet maar zou ik je afraden.

[Verkenner]

Assembled a new PC with HS3.
Stil, energiezuinig, snel

ASrock B85M-ITX Mobo
Intel Core I3 4130T 2-core Processor
SSD Samsung 840 Pro series 128 Gig SATA600
Crucial Ballistic Tactical 4 GigaByte Memory
Manhattan Serial PCI expres Card, 2-ports
Noctua NH-L9i FAN-koeler for processor
PicoPsu voeding intern 90 watt
Losse netadaptor 230VAC -> 12 VDC, 65 watt voeding zonder FAN
Win 8.1 NL 64 bit OEM
Behuizing Huntkey (zonder voeding)

Opgenomen vermogen bij een Idle Homeseer-3 is SLECHTS 16 Watt !!!
Zonder USB-devices connected.
De BIOS is getweaked en geoptimaliseerd.
Totale kosten 550 euro (Incl WIN-8.1 en Excl HS3)