copumpkin

I just figured out how to get both the sensor and the relay portions of my IOLinc to speak to my old gate controller and am feeing pretty happy! Now however comes my first foray into setting up an IOLinc with my ISY and keypad and I’m a bit lost. Here’s the rundown of the gate setup: - My gate has a momentary toggle switch mechanism that will open the gate if it’s closed, stop it in place if it’s opening, and close the gate if it’s open. This is connected to my IOLinc N/O and COM pins. - The gate controller also has a hookup that closes a circuit if the gate is open. This is hooked up to my IOLinc S and GND pins. Inside my ISY admin panel, I’ve also configured a 0.5s hold time and Momentary C mode, which claims to trigger based on sensor input. Here’s the problem: I assumed (based on an ISY wiki page for the IOLinc) that this would set it so the on and off commands to the relay would track the open and closed states of the gate, but the gate still only seems to respond to the on command on the relay, effectively behaving as if I were pressing the gate opener. Here are my questions: 1) How do I configure the IOLinc in isolation to handle on and off correctly based on the sensor input? 2) What’s the correct way to bind the combined sensor and on/off control to a keypad button such that it lights up when the gate is open (even if the keypad had nothing to do with opening the gate, like if someone used the old fashioned gate opener). I tried creating a scene with it but was a bit confused about who would be a controller and who would be a responder for it, since it’s bidirectional. 3) I’ve noticed my ISY admin panel needs me to press query on the sensor before it updates the status properly. Do I need to set devices up to poll periodically or will the IOLinc push its status? 4) Is there a good way to handle the weird intermediate state of the gate so that the off command always closes the gate, even though it would require two button presses if you try to close it while it’s opening? Thanks!

I just figured out how to get both the sensor and the relay portions of my IOLinc to speak to my old gate controller and am feeing pretty happy! Now however comes my first foray into setting up an IOLinc with my ISY and keypad and I’m a bit lost. Here’s the rundown of the gate setup: - My gate has a momentary toggle switch mechanism that will open the gate if it’s closed, stop it in place if it’s opening, and close the gate if it’s open. This is connected to my IOLinc N/O and COM pins. - The gate controller also has a hookup that closes a circuit if the gate is open. This is hooked up to my IOLinc S and GND pins. Inside my ISY admin panel, I’ve also configured a 0.5s hold time and Momentary C mode, which claims to trigger based on sensor input. Here’s the problem: I assumed (based on an ISY wiki page for the IOLinc) that this would set it so the on and off commands to the relay would track the open and closed states of the gate, but the gate still only seems to respond to the on command on the relay, effectively behaving as if I were pressing the gate opener. Here are my questions: 1) How do I configure the IOLinc in isolation to handle on and off correctly based on the sensor input? 2) What’s the correct way to bind the combined sensor and on/off control to a keypad button such that it lights up when the gate is open (even if the keypad had nothing to do with opening the gate, like if someone used the old fashioned gate opener). I tried creating a scene with it but was a bit confused about who would be a controller and who would be a responder for it, since it’s bidirectional. 3) I’ve noticed my ISY admin panel needs me to press query on the sensor before it updates the status properly. Do I need to set devices up to poll periodically or will the IOLinc push its status? Thanks!

That hadn’t occurred to me because one of the dimmers doesn’t do anything or have anything connected to the load, but I’ll give it a go, thanks! I didn’t realize Insteon scenes didn’t support direct level setting but that makes sense I guess. Thanks for the help!

I’m not sure if I’m missing something but as I already said, my setup is already working that way, with on/off and brighten/dim support from Alexa. What doesn’t work is the “set X to Y%” which is all that I was arguing for above, but OP explicitly says that isn’t possible, so that’s why I was trying to carve out a simpler subproblem (“homogeneous scenes”) where that would make sense.

Yeah, that’s what it is right now and I can dim/brighten and turn it on and off but not set it to a particular level, as expected from the top post. As you say, the only way lights can be paired like this is via scenes, but in theory at least that notion of a scene, since it represents trivially linked devices, is very easy to define dimming levels on. I agree that the broader notion of scene is much harder to talk about specific dimming levels about, but given how common N-way dimmer circuits are, it would be cool to be able to group them into a logical single light that can then be set to a specific dimming level. Or am I misunderstanding something?

Thanks!

I can’t tell from your phrasing whether this is a deliberate choice on your part, a temporary restriction, or what. Are there workarounds? I have a scene that I created just to make a 3-way dimmer and don’t really need it to be a heterogeneous “scene” but it seemed to be the only way to set up a 3-way circuit.

I’ve set up a three-way dimmer “circuit” with my ISY and a couple of Insteon dimmers. The dimmers are linked just fine and work locally. To do this I created a scene for the common lighting zone being dimmed in my ISY. I then set up ISY portal and linked it to my Echo account, exposing the scene to Alexa that way. That also seems to have the desired effect, and I can tell Alexa to turn that scene on or off, or brighten or dim it incrementally. What baffles me is that I don’t seem to be able to set a specific dimmer percentage through Alexa: it appears as far as I can tell to be rounding my settings, so if I say “Alexa, set to 49%” the light is off, and if I set it to 50 it’s fully on. Anyone know what’s up or what I can do to make it work?

Googling around shows some noise around 2010 about possibly making separate ISY firmware to support UPB but that it would require its own device and a separate PLM and such from the Insteon setup. Did that effort largely die or does it live on somewhere?

I’m considering signing up for the ISY portal but have been unable to figure out from the documentation whether the ISY skill makes it easy to assign individual Echos to certain parts of the house or devices, so saying “turn on the lights” in each room does the right thing. I know that in theory Alexa supports the feature but just can’t figure out if the ISY integration complicates that at all. Anyone have any experience with it?

I set up a “3-way” dimmer using two Insteon dimmers earlier today the old-fashioned way pressing the set button on one (one beep), then the other (two beeps), then the same the other way around, to create a bidirectional linkage. That worked fine. I then tried to do something similar via the ISY and created a scene for the two dimmers and set them both as controllers for it. Now they appear to be linked but not as linked as before if that makes sense. I believe one of them is acting as a dimmer and the other feels more binary like a switch, even though its LEDs are showing a ramping up. So what’s the direct equivalent in ISY of direct pairings of dimmers like this? Ideally there would be no situation where their status LEDs could get out of sync, they’d both act as dimmers with identical ramp rates, and turning one on physically or programmatically would cause the other to do the same thing. Is that possible? Sorry for the noob question, but it’s because I’m a noob!