apostolakisl

@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.

No. Most led ballasts output 10v and the dimmer is supposed to sink the voltage, not produce the voltage. The leviton device does convert your standard 120v dimmed output to 0-10v signal. But it is not creating the 10v, it is sinking the 10v through a potentiometer, infinite resistance =10v, closed circuit = 0v, and everything between.

I wasn't aware of this Leviton device. Sadly it is $200. It appears to be a sinking 10v dimmer, which is what I need. I bought an Insteon 10v dimmer only to discover it is a 10v sourcing dimmer. Very few fixtures I have seen use 10v sourcing, including mine. I also looked at the qubino, but I'm not certain it would work.

OK, well I don't really know how these bulbs work. I do know that some bulbs use a mixture of led's of different colors to make white light. The cree ceiling trophers I have at work, if you look at the top side of them you'll see little light beams of rgb popping through cracks and my cree ceiling cans at home, when you dim them, if you look directly at them you'll see hints of separate separate colored light sources glowing. I can't complain about those cree ceiling trophers, I have ones that are on 24/7 and are nearly 10 years old. You can't tell the difference between those and the ones right next to them that are only on 40 hours per week. Most of your "Edison" style led bulbs use uv leds and phosphorous coatings to produce "white" light. It works pretty well, especially for candelabra style bulbs and has a descent cri since it isn't an led that makes the light but rather phosphorous. Similar to a fluorescent light.

color temperature ie "warm" and color rendering are different things. You can't appreciate cri from a photograph. A lot of people won't realize it until you alternate between a good cri and a bad cri and see how much different things look. For example, I had some poor cri bulbs in one hallway and good cri bulbs in a different hallway. Both hallways had the same paint, but the one hallway looked ghastly. I started to look into repainting, but later realized it was the same paint. So I changed the bulbs instead. And of course it depends on the exact wavelength "holes" that a particular bulb has and the color of the object you are illuminating. So two bulbs with a identical cri and temperature won't necessarily look the same. Or a particular bulb may look very nice in one situation, and bad in another. A CRI of 100 is a perfectly flat spectrum and accurately displays the color of any object.

I assume they use some mix of the rgb leds to create white light, perhaps in combination with some white leds. I say this because I have seen some that will change the color temperature of their "white" light per your choice. That is almost certainly done by adding in some red or blue. Regardless, when in "white" light mode, they will have a cri but none seems to be listed. I must assume this lack of info is because the info is bad. Perhaps I am not finding the info, but if it were some really good number, I can't imagine it wouldn't be front and center. Cri really does make a difference when looking at people's faces (and lots of other things, but in the living room, it is faces that matter).

I'm pretty hesitant about rgb bulbs and any bulb that does not specify cri. Personally, I don't really ever want to have anything but regular light and I like my light to not make people look sick. I looked up these bulbs and they don't say anything about cri, which perhaps is because the color isn't fixed. But probably the cri is not very good or they would brag on it. I have been to homes of people who have these, and they get all giddy when they show me how they can change the color, then, once the party trick is over, the lights get set back to "white" for the rest of the night. It has been my experience that straight up high quality led's with long life and good cri cost a bit more, so I'm thinking at this price and with all the other costs of the wifi and whatnot, the actual light part of the light isn't very good.

Yes, I lost my favorites. I had to do them all over again. After it did sync, I clicked "test local network" and that was successful. I don't have time right now to mess with it anymore. EDIT: Also, I would suggest an option to have the app open into favorites directly.

@Javi None of the issues you speak of exist. I did not have a / at the end of the IP. I have not changed the firmware since the last sync. In fact, I changed nothing between something like 4 attempts to sync and then finally it sync'd.

@Javi after I added local network, it had to resync. Why? And now it is failing to sync saying I have an incomplete firmware upgrade. It syncs just fine using the portal. After several attempts, it finally finished the sync. But several times failed for various reasons.

You need to understand how ISY works. The items in an "if" clause are triggers as well as conditions. Whenever any of the items in an "if" clause happen, the program "triggers". At that point, if the program is currently running, it terminates where it is and starts over from scratch. It will then evaluate the entirety of the "if" clause and the result will either be true or false. ISY programs only are running at the instant of a trigger, or, should the "then/else" clause contain waits or repeats, it will continue running while those are valid. IF time is 8am . . . .8am will be a trigger and will be true only at that instant. This program can never be true except at that instant. If status is 25% . . . any changes in status will be a trigger, true if it is 25%, otherwise false If control is switched on . . . pushing the "on" side of a paddle is the trigger, no other action on the paddle does anything. Similar to "if time is 8am", it is an instantaneous event that is only true at the instant ISY "hears" from the switch that someone hit the on paddle. A program can contain lots of items, when any one of those items triggers, the entire "if" clause is evaluated as either true or false based on the entirety of the conditions. IF time is 8am . . . . trigger is 8am, it will only be true at that instant If time is from 8am to 10am. . . . two triggers, 8am and 10am, but, It will be true if any other trigger happens between 8 and 10 If time is 8am and control x is switched on . .. .never works both a single time event and a control event are "instantaneously" true. So they would never happen at the exact same time. Your original question seemed to say you had outside bounds that you wanted your lights to turn on. So, you can set those outside bounds by saying From x time to y time. Now the program will never be true outside of those times. Now add, in other conditions, understand, these other conditions will also be triggers. and time is from sunrise minus 20 minutes to y time. Now you have 3 triggers, x time, y time and sunrise minus 20. All 3 will trigger the program. x time and sunrise minus 20 are "true" conditions, and y time is a "false" condition. For a program to be true, all conditions must be true at time of the trigger. The program is not constantly running. Only runs at trigger events. From 8am to 10am does not mean the program is running from 8am to 10am, it only runs at 8am and 10am. Realize that if something else turns the light off after it has been turned on (like you manually turn it off), it will stay off. This program only runs at those 3 trigger times. Similarly, if you turn the light on outside of those conditions, it will stay on.