simplextech

Never heard of this until today either. I'm interested in learning the "Why" about this....

I've never heard of the can't be upside down thing before... BR30's are primarily used in ceiling fixtures.

On paper it looks very nice.... however I've seen it before how the marketing and product vastly differ once they are in production.

Agreed. I currently and probably always only use Hue/LiFX in lamps. My primary lighting are all switched. I played with some Hue lamps in the dining room and although they are ok the features never got used by anyone so it made no sense at all. Speaking of network problems... I've had that happen with the LiFX where I had a router failure overnight and the LiFX bulbs became mostly useless in function however them not working was I suppose a secondary router monitor?

Well I'm just too literal this early

That's why I put the caveat of finding one rated for that purpose....which I don't know of any....

In the Z-Wave world not really. You could possibly get away with a inline dimmer module if you found one that was rated for the motor amperage. Qubino, Fibaro or Aeotec make some but I have no experience with those for fan control.

There is the GE Fan Controller and the HomeSeer Fan Controller. Those are the current Z-Wave offerings. With Z-Wave these are ONLY for fan speed control and do not control the lights. https://www.amazon.com/GE-Controls-Required-SmartThings-14287/dp/B06XTKQTTV https://shop.homeseer.com/products/homeseer-hs-fc200-z-wave-plus-fan-controller

The switch always needs to be on for the LiFX or Hue bulbs to work. The Hue are more forgiving and faster to come online from a no power state though which provides (to me) more flexibility in their use beyond table lamps. I currently but may change this only use LiFX/Hue in table or floor lamps that always have power and then I use the polyglot nodeserver to turn the lamps on/off and set brightness etc. I do have a KPL setup for the living room area that has no load to it so it's just a remote and it can be used to turn on/off all lights in the room or select individual lamps.

With HomeSeer I use their MyHS service. It works well enough and is as secure as your password is for standard remote access. I use tokens for app/script based access for plugins so I don't have id/password floating around in scripts or on 3rd party systems. With my ISY units I use the ISY Portal service. This works very nicely for me. It allows the same secure remote access to my system for status/control when I'm remote and they provide tokens for third party integrations as well. With all of the options for network equipment and built in VPN functionality I can VPN directly from my phone so I find limited reason to use port forwarding except for poking the hole for the VPN.

I don't recommend "port forwarding" of internal systems in general from consumer routers. The HS3 method uses the MyHS service not port forwarding. The ISY uses the ISY Portal method. However with any system you are still free to do port forwarding if you choose.

So you are doing port forwarding through your own firewall. That is still possible with HS3 and with ISY. I personally don't advise it with any system.

HomeSeer provides access for one user to one HS3 server with limited bandwidth for free. This is included with the HS3 license purchase. There is an annual fee for increased bandwidth and multiple users/systems through the MyHS service. With the ISY there is the ISY Portal which has an annual fee that is not very expensive. The ISY does not have a web based GUI like HS3 but a more simplified control GUI. I've heard this may change in the future but the current administrative interface is the Java Admin Console. There are several 3rd party mobile apps that are available and many use. Since they are 3rd party they do have a cost associated with them the same as how plugins for HS3 are developed by 3rd parties and there is a fee. The ISY is a great controller and can be paired with HS3 as well with the ISYInsteon plugin. So if remote access is the critical concern you can still utilize HS3 remote access simply to control your ISY devices

Yes both are accessed via polyglot Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

This is very true. The LiFX bulbs are brighter and colors are more vivid. I have both lights in my house. I'm currently running Hue Ambiance in the dining room for a test and I have LiFX in all of the table/floor lamps. From an ISY integration stand point both work well and are responsive. Both are local control as the Hue bridge is local and the LiFX nodeserver is using the local API. The only concern in regards to LiFX is that they are Wifi so if you have poor Wifi signal then you might have issues.

The ones listed as "Released" are.

Given the common hardware for SOC's the Wifi and BT radios are on the same chip. So the marketing is to hype both radios even though in practical use only one or possibly even none will be used. It's always preferred to have a HA controller hard wired. However the Wifi does provide a mobility advantage for including stubborn devices when needed. I can see some edge cases for BT but again if the system is in the basement corner then those cases are now diminished as well. As long as the system is open and hackable I'm sure someone will get creative though

Some of the larger systems do have a direct Insteon interface. Mark did a great job on the Insteon plugin for HomeSeer. However it's very common for other HA systems to actually use the ISY as a device controller for Insteon. Allonis MyServer, Charmed Quark (CQC) are among the other big HA players and they use the ISY as the device controller. I suspect their rational is because of the stability and quality of the ISY as an Insteon controller versus them doing the Insteon integration work directly. A lot of systems don't use the Insteon Hub as an integration point due to lack of developer access to the Hub. It took me a lot of effort, e-mails and phone calls and by LUCK I got in contact with someone inside Insteon who was able to get me setup with the developer access necessary to develop for the Insteon Hub. I think this difficulty of getting documentation and the API keys needed is a reason why ISY is the preferred integration point for Insteon today. ISY is a great device controller and Polyglot is making things much better bringing "apps". However it is still lacking in the areas of the Admin Console being fairly dated and not having support for string data types for values makes it very difficult to provide any kind of multi-media type data... think music metadata, now playing, movies, any kind of dynamic value data, even geofence names as an example are not easy to do today with the ISY and requires a bit of "hacking" of re-writing the node profile to update the "string". There are things I do today with plugins in HomeSeer that are simply not possible yet with the ISY.

The ISY does already and I'm certain that will be carried over. ISY is already integration with HomeSeer via a plugin (I use it too). I've been asked to develop and integration with the Hubitat system to ISY as well. However that is a more tightly constrained development environment so it will take a bit longer to develop. There's also already the Home Assistant component which is also very good

Released Ambient Weather Hubitat In Development Traccar GPS tracker/geofencing LinkTap irrigation system www.link-tap.com FireBoard BBQ Thermometer system https://www.fireboard.com/ Withings HealthMate Life360 I'm basically working on re-writing most of the plugins I've written for HomeSeer. The eventuality of a "market place" or some method (donations?) of getting paid for nodeserver's however would be very nice considering I don't make money from installs but from doing the software development/integration/programming of systems.

Guys you're killing me... look at all of the Polyglot nodeserver's to write now with people buying up systems to run them on... sheesh!!!

I thought the HomeKit Insteon Hub had been discontinued??? Are they reviving it? I see it can be purchased on SmartHome.com but is it the older version or some new one? I wonder if they have also updated firmware along with their new app to fix whatever issues they had???

I think the long term plan is that Polisy will become the next-gen ISY... For those of us now it's just an rpi replacement on paper currently. However come release it may be much more and be a fully capable ISY+Polyglot system... which I think based on what I've read is the goal...

Yes Polisy with the Hue or LIFX nodeserver will do this. I do this today with a rPi running Polyglot with the Hue and LIFX nodeservers.

All within the give route/path must be ZWP. NWI is a feature of ZWP. So be aware that if you have none ZWP devices if the route changes (and they do) to a particular device or group of devices then NWI may not work sometimes when it did work before.