apostolakisl

Rf works very well all by its lonesome. I have bridged buildings on separate utility connections using rf only with great success. Failing plms on the other hand have become ubiquitous. I also referring you to the thread using a Rpi and USB RF dongle where error free operation is reported.

Good to see that UD took that route. I am very pleased that it accepts USB plm. I think I will pick up a couple of the USB sticks. My suspicion is that these lack the failure mode of the line voltage PLM's.

Might see if you can make the error say something like "that portal account already registered" instead of that jargon.

What is up with this? I have two ISY's on the same portal account and when I tried to login to the portal to add the second ISY, I got this. Also, unlrealted question, I don't see any place to input the lan ip address but it does have you enter the lan ssid. Is the purpose of this that UD mobile will search the lan when connected to that ssid?

Last I heard, ISY running on Polyisy wasn't going to support Insteon, at least not natively. Has this changed? I as well have Polyisy pro and that was pretty much because I bought it in the initial roll out at a special price. The wifi would be useful if you wanted to put the polisy somewhere without ethernet, but I don't see that this is so useful. For the most part, I would expect Polyisy to be sitting next to your router. I have no idea what bluetooth application would run on polisy, but lets say they come up wtih something. Obviously this is a fairly short range radio so Polisy would need to be close to your phone or whatever bluetooth device you intend on using with it. Now, perhaps the best place to put polyisy is not next to your router or some other ethenet source but rather near the other bluetooth device, so wifi comes in handy. But first, UD has to devise some useful bluetooth application.

FYI, I was offline as well on Sunday morning. Two different ISY's.

@Kevin Connolly Nice work. I ordered the parts to do it even though I don't need it, just in case stuff. If you have the dupont connector stuff I might suggest just cutting your cat6 wire and put the connector pieces directly on to the end of the cat6 instead of using that rj45 pin out connector. That would cut down a bunch on clutter. When I bought the dupont stuff for myself I was so wondering why I didn't do it earlier. Makes stuff so much easier and cleaner.

Well, yes, but also the ones with bad caps consistently fail right at 2 years. So, assuming you put it into service at the time you bought it, then this would be spot on for a cap failure. Should the version number be prior to the new design, that together with 2 years in service would confirm with very high probability that you have a dying plm. @Michaelv

As is the case regardless of how the PLM is connected, when you change out a plm, you have to do a "restore plm" from the ISY console. If you go back to the old one, then you once again have to do a "restore plm".

So the other question is if you do a soft reboot of ISY, does it affect the power on the internal header that you might be using to power your rpi?

@Michel Kohanim Can you comment on the pin out for the internal header socket? specifically, uart or rs232 pins that might be there? Also, would it overload the power supply if you had both a z-wave and a pi zero at its lowest baseline power draw (.4 watts per my google search).

I take it then that the header socket there on ISY does not have any RS232 or UART connectivity? I believe somewhere you mentioned that Michel gave you the pinout? Looked up Raspberry PI zero power. Without any accessory stuff on, (wifi, hdmi, etc) it only uses .4 watts.

Very nice work. Wondering, is there not somewhere that you can tap into the rs232 terminals on the ISY board instead of doing the U-Turn Cat6? Also you are tapping into that header. Does this not interfere if there is a z-wave board? EDIT: Trying to look at photos to figure out. The z-wave board goes into the bottom row of sockets and it looks like you tapped into the top row. Are the top row and bottom row sharing the same electrical contacts? I don't see enough pins soldered into the board for the top row and bottom row to be different and obviously the top row isn't just empty since you are using them. EDIT AGAIN: I also have to wonder if there isn't somewhere you can tap directly into ISY UART and avoid the RS232 entirely.

You may be right. It wouldn't make sense to list it as compatible with 50hz if it weren't compatible with 220/240v. There only a handful of obscure countries in the world that use 120v/50hz.

Options as I see it. 1) Get your hands on an Insteon PLM, use a voltage converter and see if it works. 2) Ditch Insteon and go with Z-wave along with ISY 3) Ditch ISY and stay with Insteon using some other non-plm interface. The HUB is listed as working with 50hz, however it only lists125v Personally, I suspect the PLM with a voltage adapter probably will work based on RF.

That sounds like what my assumption was. Transmit on zero cross, accept at any time.

@larryllix I was thinking about it and without the rf, there is just no way for the devices on the different 3 phase to be in sync. None of the 2 or 3 phase appliances (ie hot water heater) would be able to pass plc across since they won't share zero points. It has to be the rf. I suppose it could be that the rf transmission occurs on the zero cross, but receipt of the rf is independent of the AC zero point. I assume you could tune an rf receiver into the insteon frequency and plug that into an oscilloscope on one channel and on another channel watch the AC current for Insteon traffic.

Did not know that. With all the newer Insteon stuff being 50 or 60hz, something has to give here. Of note, I use Insteon on 3 phase building and that works just fine with various devices all out of sync with each other on zero crossing points. I even have two separate 3 phase buildings linked together with a single rf device. To simplify the description, imagine a 200 foot extension cord with a dual band device at the end. I is is plugged into building A, stretches across the yard and ends next to building B, where another dual band device is located next to it and plugged into building B. This works perfectly and keeps the two buildings electrical systems isolated.

Dual band would likely take care of that problem. All the other insteon stuff is designated as 50 or 60hz, so once it gets picked up by the first device it would go on the power line and rf even if the plm didn't. Just not positive if 120vac 50hz would be OK for the power supply in the PLM, assuming you used a 240 to 120 adapter.

The PLM is 120vac 60hz . . . if you can get one. They are not currently being produced. The official reason is chip shortages. Not sure what would happen if you used a voltage adapter

That is the sure fire way to do it. Or "hide" your plm. You could plug it into a signal blocker, Or use a UPS, unplug the UPS from the house and cover the PLM with a metal electrical box or some other metal enclosure to attenuate radio. Usually a UPS will block power line communications even if plugged in, but you might as well unplug it just to be sure. The radio attenuation is still going to be a question mark. Trouble with trying to just have your house be "quiet" by not using any insteon devices can be sabotaged by things like a program running or a motion detector. Possibly even a heartbeat from a battery device.

Any Insteon traffic while doing a PLM links check will mess it up. You almost have to take the PLM to a location that has no Insteon devices. At this point, your pre-check is almost certainly wrong, so any comparison now is impossible. More importantly, are you able to link the devices that you were having issues with before?

Might consider doing a factory reset on the PLM and then restore it. Reason being that orphan links are common. You could have dozens of them. I have done that to my PLM a couple times over the years.

The first clue was it didn't dim the light despite my non-powered passive rheostat style dimmer working fine. I put a volt meter with nothing connected to the Insteon device and I read voltages between 0 and 10 depending on how I set the dim level. I called smarthome and read the literature and found no provision for changing the type of dimmer. You could change attributes of the other outputs on it, but not the dimmer. If you determine otherwise, please let me know.

I believe I own one of these. Assuming Insteon ever only made one 10v dimmer, then I must. I would have to crawl into the attic to check the model. Anyway, it is a 10v sourcing dimmer. Which is not what I need. Currently I am just using it as on/off. It also has some other functions, I forget, perhaps it has some low voltage relays in it? Anyway, I have tried to see about adapting it to convert the 10v sourcing into sinking. There is a thread on here where we talk about that. I have not yet tried it.