oh2bnMaine

I have the catchup field set to 10 minutes. The coop door opens 10 minutes before sunrise and it was well past 11am when this occurred. For these programs, I only use sunrise and a "bad error" variable to prevent the program from running. I actually have open/close sensors in place but they aren't reliable (yet). I'm finding the sensor that marks when the door is all the way down works great. I'm not seeing status for the sensor marking when the door is open all the way. There's an extra sensor that marks when the door has gone up too far as well, which flips the "bad error" variable to 911. Since I haven't seen reliable results for the open/close sensors yet I haven't included them in the program. It just seemed odd that the program runs at reboot.

I've never fully understood what is supposed to happen after the ISY reboots. Hopefully someone can educate me. Today, I rebooted my ISY. Then, I got an alert that the chicken coop door was opened via my "sunrise" program. It is well past sunrise. So, does that mean the program activates because the time is conditional? Is there something I can do to stop this from getting triggered? (I do not have this program set to run at startup.)

I've been testing the sensitivity reducing pins in a couple of places and so far it doesn't reduce things enough. So, I didn't think that would be useful enough for my situation to implement. One sensor "sees" a plant's leaves move and starts alerting me even after being desensitized. I'll look at where I have the sensors mounted. Maybe I can change their orientation. But lower usually equates to being more noticable, which isn't ideal from my perspective. Where they are mounted now, people don't notice them at all. I have been thinking that I could point them straight down in specific areas to create a detector that only announces when something crosses a line.

Do you have any recommendations? Are they Insteon-aware? I would like to keep the ISY as my base for my smarthome logic if at all possible.

Hopefully the cute title gets more people to share their thoughts. I'm curious what potential solutions to my problem will be provided! We have the Insteon Motion Sensor II devices scattered around the house. I use them to trigger lights at night. I also use them to trigger video/image capture from security cameras. I get an SMS alert when their sense motion. Certain Insteon light switches throughout the house will beep as well. The program is pretty slick, if I do say so myself! Then we got free range chickens. Our ISY opens the chicken coop door at sunrise and closes it at sunset. So, the entire day, the chickens are running around the property triggering motion. It has rendered my "security" system as described above to be pretty useless. Are there other motion detection products I could use that would not get triggered by a 2-pound chicken?!

Ok. Thanks. I will stop trying then. This is unfortunate. I have been experiencing inconsistent results using IFTTT webhooks to get a REST command to succeed when using HTTPS. I have 6 set up. Three check if a cell phone is on the network. Three check when it is off the network. The resulting webhook REST commands tell my ISY whether each phone is online or offline. These represent when different people are home or away. Depending on who is away, the ISY will do different things related to the security protocols. Anyway, sometimes, the HTTPS webhook fails while the HTTP webhook always succeeds. I don't like using the admin ID to do a REST command without HTTPS. ?

My solution to ensuring that I can use the admin console for either of my ISYs regardless where I am has worked well for me. I have a Raspberry PI at each of my houses. I gain access to them using VNC. That gives me the ability to act like I am actually at the house. I use each Raspberry PI for other things as well. With tools like sunwait, for instance, I can do more with sunrise/set than straight ISY functionality. I use it for other things like network debugging. I have programs that check if devices are online, and if they are not, the ISY devices they are connected to will reboot. I like my approach because when I open Finder, the ISY automatically shows up without me having to do any other steps. And I don't have to physically be on premise. All I have to do is VNC to the correct house. No monitor, mouse or display needed. The Pi just sits on a shelf. $0.02

Is it possible for me to use the rest command with a non-admin user id? I want to start issuing REST commands via webhooks in IFTTT and would prefer to NOT use the admin user id.

Thanks for the clarification.

New Issue: I just experienced another odd behavior (5.0.16 RC). I use conditionals on program folders to control some activities. I just realized that a rather complex conditional was showing as TRUE, which made no sense (unless I programmed it wrong). So, I copied the folder using export/import from clipboard functionality. The copy of the folder's icon shows as RED, which is correct. The original showed as GREEN. The logic was untouched after the export/import was performed. I tried to reproduce this issue with a different folder and had no issue. I modified the conditional logic and the folder flipped from GREEN to RED as expected. Prior Issue: Going back to the REST issue I posted the other day, I only see that error on one of my two ISY's. The one in Maine does not exhibit the following. Only the one in Florida does. I'm re-sharing the image for reference purposes.

I am been digging into using REST commands. I just tried to use the /rest/status command and got this error message. Any thoughts?

Has anybody else seen this quirk? I don't want to call it a bug because that makes it sound more serious than it is. I did not notice this quirk until I modified the second program. I was adding a step that would keep track of a variable value from before a reboot by utilizing the INIT TO placeholder. The first time, I flipped from Number to Variable in my variable assignment statement and it worked as expected. The next time -- the second program -- it skipped Variable and went straight to System. I had to cycle around back to Number again in order for it to go to Variable as the next option. You can see this in the video. This seems inconsistent to me. Am I missing something?

I also have confirmed that one of the switches that I thought was dead because I was having communication issues with it is, in fact, alive and well. I added it to the garage as the first device in that building. The garage is 100 feet from the closest Insteon device. So, clearly, the switch was never broken. I'm relieved I saved all the "broken" switches over the years. I'll re-purpose those as the need arises.

My PLM links table, with all scenes reinstalled, has over 150 lines in it now. And all programs are working as designed. Over the past 48 hours, I have only seen one switch flip to a red exclamation point...and that goes away when I do a query of that specific device. Thank you to all who've helped me through this. Before this ISY/PLM issue I never really understood the paradigm used for controlling the switches. I didn't understand where information was being stored and where the activities were initiated from. I think my understanding has improved by leaps and bounds. Now, to get back to my place in Florida and implement what I've learned about scenes and state variables. I have a bunch of switches beep when the motion detector detects motion. In order to not get too annoyed, I added a countdown timer that limits the alerts to once every X seconds. My wife will be able to change the timer to use whatever value she prefers.

#4 - Of course, keep in mind that I honed this finely tuned machine over hours of sitting watching sports on TV, so I could have my order of operations and results witnessed screwed up. I didn't always do steps 1 & 2 in that order. My observation mentioned in step 4 could have been the result of me doing some of the steps in a different order. Maybe I did the factory reset after adding the device back to the ISY? #5 - I'm not sure if this step really did anything. I was tired of trying a ton of stuff and finding that I should have done more, so I came up with a list of steps that touched on everything.

I think I have things working! My bathroom programs are working. All three of them. Let me describe my solution and see if there's any logic my madness. Factory reset switch Delete switch from ISY Link switch to ISY Check Device Links (should be empty or just 00000) Restore Device Rename Device Check Device Links (and compare to PLM table) Confirm switch changes show up in ISY Admin Console Confirm programs work as expected I found that in certain situations I did not need to do all these steps, but every time I followed all these steps I was able to get the switch connected properly. Yes, this means that last night and this morning, I performed the above steps for all devices in the house. It took hours. But I'm glad I did it. Everything is much cleaner now. All motion detectors are working. I even added a little flourish for my office. I have it set so that the light in the office flashes whenever there is motion in the driveway (up the hill and on the other side of the house). This lets me know when someone is moving around (or drives over to see me). I don't have any devices in the office that beep. Up in the house, light switches around the house beep when there's motion approaching the deck/driveway.

My PLM is 51.10.76. This is the motion detector that doesn't seem to be working. I have been doing this link table check on a lot of devices. I found a link to a device that made no sense (actually, I'm finding a lot of these). I tried to clear the link, but wasn't having any luck. I deleted the device and the links persist. Is there a standard process for clearing these bad links?

I went for a drastic test. I removed all scenes. Here's the ISY Link Table for the Mudroom 3-way Secondary switch. The ISY is 51.10.76.

I split the motion detection program into two. One for each of the motion detectors. I can confirm that one program works consistently. The other does not. I have yet to see the one linked to the motion detector that has issues change state in the ISY admin console. The other changes state consistently. So, what do I do next? I've tried factory resetting my brand new PLM and doing a restore. I've tried restoring each device individually. I'm close to removing all switches and reconnecting them. Then building the scenes again and reloading my programs from backup. But this seems extreme.

I should add, I now have 90 links in the PLM link table.That's definitely at least twice the number of devices.

Ok. I'm back again for more. All my switches seem to be online, but programs are still not operating as they used to. Program 1: Turn on deck lights when motion is detected. >>> This program works fine for Motion Detector 1, but does not activate for Motion Detector 2. I have MD2 sitting next to me right now and I can see it flashing green as I move around, yet the program doesn't run. Program 2; I have the same two programs on all three bathrooms. The two programs are only working for one bathroom. The other two sets of programs never run when the conditions should be TRUE >>> For the sake of simplicity, we can focus on the program that turns the bathroom fan off after X minutes. I have it set to 5 seconds for testing purposes. I have included a screenshot that includes a test to prove that the program would initiate in the half bath and still control the guest bathroom's fan (proving the ISY programs can control that fan switch). The variant for the guest bath hasn't worked since the PLM was replaced. I have recreated this program. I have copied the half bath program and made modifications. Any suggestions for me??? I'm including this in the same thread because I assume this is all related to the PLM replacement. Thanks in advance.

Yeah. I'll be moving the PLM over to a rarely-used outlet that's directly attached to the breaker box. The original location was on the same outlet that I have a bunch of the house networking gear (cable modem, 16-port switch, raspberry pi, nas). It has been there for the past 12 years. There are a few light switches that have always acted up because of this location, but since they aren't used in programs or scenes I never bothered to find a different location.

Update: Everything but the motion sensors and water leak sensors seem to be working. I'll work on those tomorrow!! I did a Restore Device on each device individually. I had to move the PLM to different plugs twice. Thanks for the help.

Another idiosyncrasy. I did the Restore Device step for the 3-way Primary listed in the image. The 1011 icon lit up, so I did a Write Changes to Device step as well. That did not clear the 1011 this time. Now, when I move to the Restore Device step for the first 3-way Secondary, it also tries to write to the 5-way Primary device as well. It will continue to do this until I disable the Primary just to speed things up. I don't know if this is indicative of anything. I feel like I'm driving blind. I updated the image with a more complete list of the fails. Any device that had a 1011 icon I disabled. The red exclamation points occurred after using the Restore Device step. I'm going to unplug the television and see if things go more smoothly. Then I may try moving where the PLM is plugged in if I can find enough extension cords!

Should I glean any information from the fact that some devices (after the Factory Reset PLM & Restore PLM process completed) have a ramp rate of 9 seconds? I set everything to default to 0.1 seconds. Also On Level is set to OFF in this situation.