brians

Posting a question like this on this forum is going to result in very biased opinions favoring ISY platform. On the other hand, if posted same pretty much anywhere else, most would probably wonder what Insteon or and EISY is. Setup HA on a spare computer, install the ISY integration and experiment - it won’t hurt anything to have running separately. Then form your own opinion but only by giving it a fair chance; it may take months of off and on with it. There may be times you get frustrated, so just leave and come back later and go research online, watch videos and tutorials (there are lots of them). You may like it or end up hating it. It took me a while to get the hang of it. I actually had home assistant installed for about a year before I seriously gave it a shot and then something clicked and all made sense to me. It is even easier now than it was two years ago in regards to setup, creating automations, easier dashboards with drag and drop arranging to list a few examples.

Home assistant integration advantage is you can then use home assistant as main system while having support for old IoX setup, in my case Insteon. I use my polisy just to bridge over Insteon into HA. I could use native Insteon integration but since I already have polisy setup it’s easier. If polisy ever dies I could just put a plm on my home assistant but I’ll probably get Eisy. One of the few things that IoX does better than HA is Insteon support. With 2025 matter Insteon bridge update there should be no need to use the isy integration in home assistant since HA supports Matter (but I still recommend since it works so well). However if you are not using home assistant and just want HomeKit support for Insteon from isy then this seems like the way. HomeKit advantage is you can use Siri, and also HomeKit is integrated deep into every Apple device like iPhones, iPads, Apple Watch, appletv etc. If you don’t use Apple devices then this is of no benefit but if you do you are missing out. Just because you have HomeKit support doesn’t mean you cannot use other preferred interfaces or apps for specific things, but why not have it ? There are no negative side effects to having devices in HK via a bridge! Home Assistant has a HomeKit bridge integration which allows you to make nearly any device in HA work with HomeKit.

You can make a toggle using a state variable. Just make a program that sets the variable 1 or 0 everytime a button is pressed. Then use that variable to trigger a program which turns on/off a light. I think I have example where I did this also.

Looks like isy doesn’t support group 4 and group 5 associations for this device that is why numbers are missing. The associations only work with other zwave devices. To use buttons to control other things like Insteon you have to make programs variables etc and manually set leds with parameters. I have example using zen32 elsewhere in forums which could be applicable. Unfortunately isy programming is limited and can run into race conditions and uncertainties due to its execution options (or lack of options) where it restarts program every time is run.

2476S original. Still worked but I replaced with zwave switch. I have several in this range no longer using. First Insteon I got in 2005 - still have receipt.

Current Insteon devices will never support matter natively and will require something like the Insteon hub or eisy to bridge the devices to matter. Insteon hub has built in plm. Eisy requires a plm. However, neither of these devices currently have Matter support released. Therefore if you want to play with matter devices right now and have an Insteon hub, or eisy and insteon, then the best solution is to use home assistant and use respective integrations. Home assistant can then act as a matter bridge which should work with Insteon entities via integration. This should allow you to expose Insteon to other Matter like Apple, google etc. (in case of Apple I would suggest the HomeKit Bridge integration instead of mucking about with matter) https://smarthomescene.com/guides/exposing-home-assistant-entities-as-matter-devices/

If the only reason is to install Home Assistant, I don't believe the EISY would be the best experience. Instead buy an inexpensive PC for $50-$100 and install HA on it. Install the ISY integration and connect it to your Polisy. What we really need is IoX to be able to run in a VM such as Proxmox, but that will probably never happen but I can still wish... I would pay UDI for a license to do this... just a light version that supports Insteon only via USB PLM, with minimal programs, no node servers, z-wave, zmatter etc.

There should be an option to run multiple instances of an if/then statement in a program.

When I select a folder, and device in that folder, pressing top left back arrow takes me back to the root Devices and Scenes. The expected behaviour would be to go back to the previous folder. And it is not clear to click the picture of that house to go into devices. Took me a while to figure out also and I can see how people mistake it for a blank screen.

Received new one from Aartech and installed last Friday. Examine old one and nice and crispy... I would like to say that installing new Fanlinc went smoothly, but had a few issues on ISY side... Could not Add the new device in UD Mobile using the Insteon ID... seems that app only support adding Insteon using linking mode, which I could not seem to do from the fanlinc, or take time to bother figuring out. Had to run downstairs and add manually using the AC. Replacing fanclinc did not work using the replace device feature... got a not responding error after a reboot of AC. I ended up having to delete it and re-add again using AC. Naming it the same as before and doing a reload of Home Assistant ISY integration and everything working as before.

@BeakerIs your program in a disabled folder by any chance? If there is a condition in the folder which contains the program that is false, then you cannot even run the program manually.

I was running two separate Z-Wave networks for a while. When I moved from Home Assistant I moved Z-Wave devices from my Polisy manually by first excluding and then including in Home Assistant (Z-Wave JS). Both networks worked fine but I am only talking about 40 devices in total. I had my Polisy Z-Wave still working for long time as a test, but I recently disabled the radio since is useless to me. I only use Polisy for my legacy Insteon in case anyone reading this is wondering. I am not sure what would happen if had multiple larger Z-Wave networks, but I suspect it would still work because Z-Wave is encrypted to a particular controller so the other network will just ignore, and I don't think there is too much network chatter with Z-Wave. With Zigbee you can change the channel to run multiple coordinators, but cannot after adding devices or they need to be repaired. The Zigbee channels sit in the valleys between the WiFi channels' peaks so not really an issue with interference(at least I never found one and I am using all three common 2.4Ghz WiFi channels).

Heard a loud pop in middle of night woke us up. Dead FanLinc. Ordered a new one, should be in this week. This one was purchased in 2019, which was replacing a previously failed one which lasted longer, probably 8 years. I was going to look into other options for the fanlinc but not much out there and its just easier to replace this one and hopefully get another 4-5 years out of it.

Updated mine using AC. No issues.

No it is in admin firmware and says firmware 5.8.3 is up to date. I’ll try when at home later.