apostolakisl

You need to stop thinking of it as a hub. It is an access point. The best access point, better than the access point that is called an access point. I just stumbled across it because I needed some lamplincs and someone was selling a brand new kit of 2 lamplincs and a hub for less than the two lamplincs cost by themselves. So then I had the hub, just for the heck of it tried using it as an access point and was pleasantly surprised. Been running now for maybe 5 years, maybe more as the only plc/radio interface at my church activities building. The ISY and PLM are in a different building and the plc runs to building number two by what basically amounts to a 150 foot extension cord where it plugs into the hub. Without the hub, there is zero com at building 2. Neither plc or radio is detectable in building 2 without it.

Not sure what you mean. But simply put, you plug it in. Done. It will repeat all traffic it receives via either plc or radio as both radio and plc.

Virtually everything can work with ISY/Polisy. I know a few of the newest and unusual devices have limited functionality because Insteon refused to give the specs to UDI and, while UDI has the ability, they just did not want to spend the time reverse engineering them. I personally don't have many unusual devices, all the various Insteon wall switches and plug in lamp/appliance modules work. Fan links work, water sensors, motion sensors, and that wraps up what I own.

I have found Insteon hub to have a really powerful radio and serve as an excellent access point. As I mentioned elsewhere, I set up some Insteon thermostats at my church activities building without any other Insteon devices. Initially, I used a standard Insteon access point, but it had really bad com, even with several of them. Then I switched to a single hub and com is now perfect. I never configured the hub, it is just a plc/radio interface. The first hub did did. Insteon replaced it and did not ask for it back, so I played, replaced the caps, and it works again. I can't imagine what might have been if Insteon had just spent 10 cents more per device and used top of the line caps. Saving those 10 cents might be what cost them the company.

The store is closed for all brands. You will notice if you try to buy anything that still exists it just forwards you to Amazon. This is not unusual to just "boom" be gone. There have been large companies that just one day the employees show up and the doors are locked, even they have no idea. I had a tenant that actually did that to me and stiffed me on the rent.

FYI, hubs also die from bad caps. I fixed one just for fun. I use a couple hubs to help with long range Insteon radio. It seems that the radio in the hub is much stronger than the radios in all other devices. Could be just other random issues, but I use Insteon thermostats at my church. They are radio only of course. I tried using multiple dual band plug in modules first and had dismal com. I tried a hub, and it is flawless. The radio covers a distance of maybe 100 feet through metal stud walls.

Well, just the devices made by Universal Devices (UDI), the company whose forum you are writing on. The trouble is you need a plm to interface the UDI device with Insteon and the PLM's are only made by Insteon. Pretty much that means ebay for a used/new old stock. I would suggest getting a polisy because it supports all PLM's (USB and Serial). The Polisy is a newer product and is, I believe now in beta, but I think you will be fine with it. You could get an ISY 994i but then you will be limited to the serial plm (unless you want to hack a usb/serial adapter for it). But Polisy is the future for UDI so I would go that route. I imagine the 994i will stop being supported in maybe 5 to 10 years. Of course ISY/Polisy can control and interface a myriad of other products, the most widely adopted one being z-wave, but there are tons of other things. Polisy is the name of the hardware device that the controllers run on. The base controller is ISY, which natively handles Insteon and Zwave. I believe z-wave radio comes standard with polisy with the option to purchase a stronger radio. Of course the Insteon "radio" (PLM) is as discussed. 994i base model does not have a zwave radio. In addition to ISY running on polisy, polyglot (PG) is a separate piece of software running side by side with ISY on Polisy. Polyglot serves as the middle man between all sorts of things and ISY, pretty much anything with an API. Things like weather stations, Tesla, Roomba, camera software, pool control systems, alarm systems (DSC and Elk) and on and on. UDI also hosts a cloud service at a minimal cost. This is optional but allows for access to your ISY from outside your LAN without port forwarding your router. It also manages synchronizing ISY with Alexa and Google.

One of the many reasons I hate cloud based services. Whenever I consider buying a cloud based device, I ask myself if I would be OK tossing it in the trash in a few months. If the answer is no, I don't buy it.

Not sure how relevant the patents are. Without the source code, the patents might not do much for you. I don't know. A big part of the profitability question is how expensive is it to make these devices? Seems like to make money you would need to have manufacturing costs at no more than $10 for a 2477d. Somewhere, I assume there is a pallet full of the proprietary Insteon chips. I kind of doubt that running out of those chips was the end-of-Insteon production point. Seeing as those chips are custom they would have run them in batches and no one else can use them.

@stillwater Could just be the asking price.

I wonder if there are creditors. This may have been venture capital and is just lost money. If there are creditors, this will likely all go to auction. I am a bit at a loss as to what the strategy is. Someone is gong to offer at least some amount of money for the Insteon technology. And any money is more money than no money, so why would it not sell? It would be a real shame. The Insteon protocol is so versatile and most complete of any I have seen. The myriad ways to set up scenes and whatnot is pretty much unmatched. Combined with ISY, it just works. And dual band com, in my experience, is nearly flawless. And of late, the quality seems to be great. It seems like they finally got it figured out, but a day late and dollar short.

I can't see how anyone even remotely serious about HA could go with wifi. You would have to have enterprise grade wifi to support all those devices. Wifi is just fine for a few toys around the house, but not HA.

It sounds like someone is bankrolling them, losing money, and just wanting to cut their losses. So no bankruptcy auction of the patents etc. But I can't imagine why they wouldn't agree to license the plm chip to you. How would that be anything but money in their pocket minus some attorney fees for drawing up the contract??? It may be a small negative to someone wanting to buy the whole lot of their product technology, but some simple time/quantity limits would take care of that. We appreciate your interest in making the plms and supporting your customers.

Are they in bankruptcy or are they solvent but just shut down? Are they selling their patents and secret code? If they are in bankruptcy then these things would be for sale by court order.

Website works, but as far as I can tell, everything is either sold out or sends you to amazon. We shall see who comes away with the technology. I assume someone will. In the meantime, I have plenty of spares. Wonder where Nokia comes out in this? Nokia website for the switches looks to be taken down.

The router wouldn't have any issues. I have set it to allow com between polisy and roomba bridging the two vlans. The only question is if the node server will try to re-discover roomba when (if) it senses that its subnet has changed after I return it to the more secure vlan.

Would it keep the ip address if I moved polisy to the Roomba subnet and then back again?

I would install a proper security system based smoke detector which can then easily be bridged for "informational purposes only" to your ISY via lots of methods. DSC alarm panels are quite inexpensive and UL listed and all. The smoke detectors themselves will likely cost far more than the alarm panel depending on the quantity. Linking DSC to ISY can be done with polyglot and an IP adapter for the DSC panel. If you already have a standard smoke alarm system that is just a local, interconnected, siren only type system, often they do have models with relays that can bridge to an Insteon, Zwave, or other IP based contact closure device that will link to ISY.

@bpwwer I have an i7. I keep all of my iot stuff on a different subnet that is firewalled from my important stuff. When needed, I open a path between two devices, which I have done between polyisy and roomba. I had the pg2 roomba node working, except it really doesn't work on the i7 very well at all. I also have polyisy talking to my blue iris server using the same firewall hole technique . . . so I am confident there is no firewall problem. I was hoping to use your pg3 node which appears to be expressly made for i7, amongst others. But the autodiscover does not seem to be looking across subnets, the node server log lists it as giving up after several tries and not discovering. Anyway I can tell it where to look or set the ip address manually? Thanks.

OK, getting them now. Sent a note to support.

"long time". Not sure what that means. But I am now at 3 hours.

I don't know. Not getting any email. Checked spam and all. my login name is my email address. Searched my email for that ircodes@. .. email and I see they sent me one 5 years ago. So I must have been playing with it back then. but not working now.

Not that I need any right now since I already manually learned them all on my own, but how does the website work? I already had a user/pass with them. I click to get it, it says "sent" . . . sent where? I didn't get anything in my email, no download, where? And as it turns out, the primary device I use GC for is not in the database. So I'm copying them from where I figured them out into the format GC wants. I am seeing that you did it this way because I assume it is how they come formatted from GC.

Deleted ISY from PG3 and re-added. This was my very first installation of PG3, so I had no nodes installed to screw up by doing that.

First off, very happy to have the node server. Not complaining, trying to be constructive. So many different situations with node servers because of the vast differences in node specific needs, so my comments are more to the general construct of PG, not to this node. I get it, PG is this generic template. The whole concept of the manually entered key is just not a user friendly situation. It isn't the end of the world, but it isn't really a GUI and everyone wants GUI's. Lots of directions to read and then you must manually type in "keys" precisely as expected and wondering "was the colon part of the key?" type stuff. The general format for these sorts of things are that all the "keys" are already there. Makes it obvious what info needs to be entered for values. With this particular node server, the value has the potential to get out of hand. For example, lets say you have 25 ir codes for a device, trying to input that into the format of "key" / "value", well that "value" line will be insane. You'd have to do it in a text editor and copy/paste it over. Lots of opportunity for screw ups, getting all your commas, quotes, and spaces right. Which is where I am now as I am adding my 5th "button" to the same device and plan to add about 15 to that device, with others to follow. Within PG, a system where you have radio buttons to push "add device", then "add code" would be more typical GUI stuff. Obviously, with iTach, you have these crazy *** codes that are generated for each and every ir message in the world. And unlike every other universal remote, which keeps all that code internal, itach keeps none of it onboard, instead requiring that you send the crazy code with each request. So, yeah, tough. Now I don't know anything about "control tower", I have actually been using my itach for a good 7 or 8 years as is without need to change anything, so maybe this is something new they added to simplify the ir code retrieval. All my codes I had to generate myself, which was a PITA since often times they didn't work. A lot of trial and error. What I have done here is just copy/paste the codes over from where I saved them on ISY network resources. I totally didn't need to install this node server, but I prefer using nodes to network resources, and I am also a glutton for punishment . . . screwing with things that work perfectly fine and breaking the golden rule of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Oh well.