apostolakisl

1) Try putting a wait 5 seconds as the first line of "then" (before everything else) 2) Increase other waits to 2 seconds 3) Add a testing variable at each step and just have it count 1, 2, 3 ie $test = 1 after the wait 5 seconds, then $test = 2 after the second wait, etc. 3) Right click on program in tree and hit "run then" 4) Go to variables page in less than 5 seconds, watch the variable change values and see where it goes astray. The only thing I can think of is that you have another program modifying the value midstream or stopping this program. The 1, 2, 3 will assure you that it kept moving through each step, and then the values of TempC will show you what math is happening.

He means what ISY calls "integer" variables. There are 2 tabs on the variables page. Whenever a state variable changes value, any program containing that variable in the "if" clause will trigger. Integer on the other hand or only tested inside an "if" clause when the "if" clause is executed for some other reason.

This was a topic a very long time ago. Could be about 7 or 8 years ago. LeeG who used to be a constant on this forum but for some reason is no longer around pointed it out. Lee seemed to be someone who was privy to ISY firmware code and was often referenced by Michel for answers. He clearly was more than just a "user". The thing is that usually things are executed top to bottom, but it is not guaranteed. The fact that almost 100% of the time it is top to bottom leads most people to believe that it always is top to bottom. I do believe at the time we had found some examples of things that ended up not going top to bottom. As far as I know, ISY code has not changed this behavior in its current iteration.

While I did not have any mis-behaving programs during my migration to 5.x firmware, I have seen other people say they had a few programs that needed to be re-created. I did have some problems, but those programs turned yellow indicating that ISY knew there was a transfer issue allowing me to fix them.

I'm not following exactly what the input value and output value you are getting are. However, ISY does not necessarily do sequential steps of a program in order. The only way to be certain of steps happening in order is to put a "Wait" between them. Otherwise, all items in the "then" clause are presented for processing simultaneously and the first thing may not be first done. So, try putting waits between each step and see what happens.

As Larry mentioned, yes, you can have as many programs as you want have the same trigger within the "if" clause. However, I would recommend simply putting all the "then" items into a single "then" clause rather than a bunch of programs. The exception to that would be if you have multiple triggers/conditions and some of them apply to one "then" item and some apply to a different "then" item. Like maybe some of the "then" items might be shut down at night.

That is pretty clever. And I love all their other stuff that pretends to be a person pushing buttons. Looks like $179 gets you what you need delivered for a typical two sided set of curtains to be on the internet. It appears they use bluetooth, so that would be why the hub is needed. For the $179 you also get two add-ons, but I can't find a list of add-ons. I do see they have a little remote control and a solar panel as add-ons, not sure what else they may have.

Best reason yet to not have your house filled with wifi enabled devices: https://english.madhyamam.com/en/science-technology/2019/oct/23/smart-light-bulbs-may-be-used-hack-personal-info-study Each one of those is a security risk. Unlike Insteon which can only be hacked by actually being very close to your home, and even then, can only control Insteon devices, a IoT device can be hacked from anywhere in the world and provide access to all connected devices in your home. With a hub, only the hub is a security risk, much easier to manage that and also update with patches and so on.

I wonder what people actually do with many of these devices that they just dabble in? Most of them seem to focus on "Look turn your light on from your phone". For me, that is like .001% of what I use HA for. I basically never need to control a light from my phone and only about 1% of the time use google or alexa. 99% of what I do is use logically constructed programs to make the house respond to me without me actually doing anything or doing very little. Basically, lots of programs that takes input from motion sensors, cameras, alarm system status/events, time of day, season, weather, and so on to just do what I would be doing manually. To me that is what it is all about. I would never mess with any of this if all it offered was remote control or some rudimentary timers. But I don't know. My daughter wanted to turn her bedside lamp off without leaning over to the switch. I said, sure, I'll make it so you can tell your alexa. That was too involved for her, she actually bought a clapper. That's right, my teenage daughter gen whatever the heck they call them uses 1980 technology to turn her lamp off. And then, when I was installing some shelves in her room, my drill was triggering that clapper like a strobe light.

But the earlier argument is that people are ignorant and that is why they wouldn't want Insteon.

Back to the actual point of this thread. It occurred to me, a while ago I got ubiquiti stuff and decided to a bunch of ssid's, vlans and what not. I needed to change a bunch of devices ssid/password. That was a pain. Now imagine if I had 50 or 100 more devices. Just for example, if I changed my living room cans to wifi bulbs, that would be 6 devices for just one "light". Most people don't do what I did, but most people do change isp's, get a new ap, and don't have a clue that they can just put out the same ssid/password and thus would end up changing all the devices. Or if you needed to keep your kids off the network, again, I would know how to control that from my router, but most people would again be changing passwords. Or maybe your neighbor starts stealing your wifi?

OK, but there are 100 ways to do that. In my house, when a leak detector goes off it is an actual security event. Central station gets a call, audible alerts go off, and the water valve shuts off. If I had red lights, I could do it when someone pulls into my drive (now that I have blue iris figured out for that), but instead I have my Insteon switches do a little chirp-chirp-chirp. Just out of curiosity, do any other brands have chirping switches? I really like the chirps, I use them for lots of things, and they don't alter your working conditions by changing the lighting. I use the chirps to warn you when a light is about to time out, I use it to get my kids out of the house at the right time in the morning, cars pulling in the drive, and a few other things.

I have seen colored accents lights that look good, but that is because it isn't the functional light. It is meant to light up a wall or patch of ceiling, as if it were artwork. When the light you use to actually see what you are doing is mono-chromatic, it is poor.

Was that because you could make that green growth you have disappear? Oh, I kill myself.

So far, no Klingon attacks so that feature hasn't paid off. Perhaps outdoor lights that you can do holiday tricks with, but I just don't see the indoor lights being anything more than a party trick. When my fire alarm goes off, all the lights turn on full brightness, no tricky red lights or anything to make a stressful situation more stressful. We already have a loud audible signal letting you know to get out. Wandering around the house at night with red lights isn't the greatest idea. CRI of a mono-chromatic color is horrifically bad and depending on which color light and what color your floor/object on the floor is, it could become almost invisible. The safest color light is a shade of white with a high CRI. You will see much better at a dim high CRI than a bright bad CRI. A simple example would be a green matchbox car on green carpet with a red light. It would all look black. If you like it and use it and it serves you well, then I can't argue . . .it is, at least in part, an aesthetic. I just know that in my house, if I installed such lights, I would be like, "look honey, the lights change color by pushing this button, cool eh". And my wife would be like "oh, that's nice", and then that would be the last time the lights weren't white.

why do people want their living room lights green, or red? Sounds like 1974 stoner party. Now that is old man.

For the life of me, why would you buy a wifi light bulb? Talk about way expensive and way inconvenient. With a switch, you still control the switch all regular like, with bulbs, the switch doesn't work normal at all. Furthermore, you may need 4 or 6 or 10 or who knows how many fancy *** bulbs where one fancy *** switch could do the same . . . and give you the full gamut of possible bulbs (or just keep your current bulbs). And then when the stupid bulb burns out, now you have to redo your setup and any automation you had assigned to that old bulb(s). Maybe they have a "replace with" command . . . I don't know, but I don't think so. Assuming this new software is actually nice, the average person would need nothing more than Insteon products. Now people like you and me who want to have their lawnmower integrated, well we will have more "dongles" to deal with. But even at that, with the ISY is going, the new Polisy is likely to streamline that whole thing into a seamless package. Now you can build your network starting off all super-easy like with the hub and if you want to get more fancy, you switch over to polisy, but don't have to do much in the conversion.

Hopefully! If Insteon gets to be a big player then prices might come down more and we might get a lot more product choices. I just don't get the aversion to a hub, if the software is good, the hub is invisible. It is just an extension of the device itself hidden in some closet never needing to be seen or touched. The software would make the two seem as one. Hopefully people who do cloud based realize that if the company goes bankrupt then you are hosed. Or if your internet or wifi go down, your house stops working. That is the great thing about Insteon, it works all by itself, cloud is totally optional. I certainly hope it stays that way with the new hub software.

This is nice to see. If it actually works as well as they claim it works, then it should make things as simple as anything that is "hubless". I really don't see what the heck difference it makes if your phone talks to a hub that talks to a device, or if your phone works directly with the device. I guess you have to buy a hub. It depends on costs as well. If a hub costs $80 but the switches are $10 cheaper than the competition, then an 8 switch system is break even. The other thing about a hub is that it lets your run coordinated schedules. You obviously can't run any schedules on your phone, it has to be on a permanently connected device. Either some sort of "mesh" computing where all your individual devices synchronize their internally programmed schedules, or you have a hub that keeps the schedule and all your "dumb" devices just sit there and do what they are told when they are told. The latter seems less apt to have trouble. The UI is key, that is for sure. A beautiful, slick, easy to customize, easy to understand UI (that actually works) is all that stands between Insteon as a "HA geek" product vs as a "everybody" product. The actually capabilities of the Insteon protocol lack nothing as far as I can tell, except for the occasional noise issue (which at least in my home was cured by dual band).

Yes, clearly they have been paring down to just the stuff that sells in volume. No doubt, they lost money on some of those odd-ball things like dimming ballasts and synchrolincs. Sad thing is, that those are the things that made you want to use Insteon for everything. I understand it is a tough spot to be in. If they would open up their source code or at least let other companies buy their chips, I think Insteon would end up way better off.

The point here goes back to "is insteon disappearing". An argument you are making is that Insteon needs a hub and that is just too complicated. In the context of how complicated it is too physically replace a switch . . .linking is far and away the easy part. ISY is fairly complex, but you may not need or want that. The Insteon hub is fairly simple and could be very simple if they just fixed the firmware a bit. A hub can be just as simple as a direct to wifi if the firmware is written that way. Certainly for a "lamplinc" type device a novice would be inclined to just buy it, plug it in and be done. But swapping out a switch . . .especially one in say a 3 gang box and being a 3 or 4 way switch suddenly becomes 30 minutes for electrician and probably more than an hour for the standard decently skilled home owner and probably a 1/2 days work for the novice home owner by the time they watch 10 youtube videos and get all scared and stuff and do it wrong twice. So for a wall switch . . . plug and play is never an option. If your going to swap a switch, you are invested and aren't going to care about pushing one extra button. And then there is still the router issues. Most home grade routers don't do well with lots of clients. Many brands limit you to 50 clients unless you manually override it, and there is a reason for that and it isn't bandwidth (I forget the real reason but this was all explained in very complex terms by a network pro on Cocoon a couple years ago). In short, if you have a plug and play device (ie lamplinc) and you only plan on having a few of them, then direct to wifi is great and that is why they sell them at wall mart. Those companies need 50 to 100 customers however to sell the same volume that a true HA company sells to 1 customer like your or me.

A system like that would only be valuable to someone who wanted a few lights automated er, I mean remote controlled. That is great and there are lots or people who want just that. But you hardly take over the home automation market when you aren't selling home automation. So I don't argue that there is a place for that. I just argue that it is a different product all together. Just like put put courses do a fine business, they aren't selling golf and real golf doesn't worry that it is losing market share to put put.

What is the difference if your ISY finds the device or your Google home finds it? You still have to manually acknowledge the device and somewhere in there have physical contact with the device (push a button, scan it or something to prove it is your device). Otherwise, just like the earlier post with the thermostat, your neighbor might accidentally (or on purpose) take control of your devices. The ISY, for example, is just a slightly better user interface away from being as convenient as any method. An automated light switch is never going to be plug and play. No matter what, you need to remove the old one and wire in the new one. If you can do that, you can certainly push a button on it . . . and that will be the easiest part of the whole thing. I guess you could have the lamplinc type device for plug and play, but how many table lamps do people want to automate (or I should say remote control since those plug and play setups pretty much aren't automating anything). Again, you can't start having 200 devices on your wifi.

@Mustang65 @larryllix I disagree. Most home routers can not handle that many devices. With every switch in your house on the system, you could easily be way up over 100 devices including all the other stuff you might have. I have over 50 things on my wifi as it is. It makes more sense to have a hub. The process of adding a device to your hub needs to be simple. Really there is nothing different to the end use between registering a device to their hub vs registering it to their router. Either way, you need to run some app that takes you through the linking process. ISY and Insteon is pretty easy . . .right? I mean you just push a button on your ISY console and push a button on the device. The issue with ISY is just that the console is not the greatest. Hopefully we will get a new one soon.

He seems to think Insteon switches cost $70 when commenting about the firmware not being upgradeable. Maybe he is talking about a KPL? Can a Z-wave light switch be upgraded? What brands of remote control light switches do offer firmware upgrades? I really don't know. I do know that the 2 z-wave switches I own have no upgrade capacity. But again, who TF is going to park outside my house and try to hack my light switches? Seriously, how desperate for a purpose in life would you have to be? I guess some people use Insteon to control the GDO, so I suppose you could break into a house that way. But it would be a whole lot easier to just walk up to the garage door with a crow bar and pop it open (they pretty much all can be popped like that). That is why I have an alarm system.