MarkJames

I'm just wondering if anyone here has any insight into potential conflicts between homeseer and ISY. To clarify, I use ISY parallel to homeseer. I like homeseer for TTS voice announcements throughout the house as well as some of the great plugins available such as mcsSprinkler (which is an absolutely mindnumbing piece of sprinkler control software!). At present my biggest desire is to use HSTouch on wall mounted ipads and android devices to control my ISY scenes through the ISY Insteon plugin and HSTouch server plugins. I'm just curious if anyone has had issues with writing links to ISY devices while homeseer was connected to ISY. I'm not familiar with the method with which the two pieces of software communicate with one another so I'm keen to know if I should be disconnecting homeseer and its plugins before writing/changing link tables in ISY devices or if it doesn't matter. I've had a number of ISY crashes while writing links lately but they're usually related to scenes that involves dozens of links on dozens of controllers so I attribute the failures to the complexity of the writes. I've been shutting off homeseer to see if it makes a difference but it's so subjective that it's hard to tell. mark

So what devices do you think are the most in need of filterlincs? I have a few areas that I know to be weak. I've got quite a number of UPS's and computers in the house - 11 PC's and maybe 8 UPS's. I understand those to be problems for Insteon. There's a pool but I don't think there's a filterlinc style device which will handle the load of a 220v 20A pump. There's also a hot tub but again no filterlinc for 220v 15A. How about refrigerators and freezers? Plasma TV? Heat pump/AC? I've tried to keep large current drain devices such as pumps and refrigerators etc. on circuits that have no Insteon devices. Indeed I have one sub panel which does most of my media stuff and heating/air conditioning that I've got no Insteon on at all. But if these devices can deteriorate communication along circuits other than their own then I'm not sure if my efforts to isolate Insteon from other devices has been of any use. I'm trying not to allow this to become like the access point nightmare that plagues Insteon users just starting out. It seems that when people first get their Insteon network started they think that adding more and more access points will fix their problems when in fact that's not the case. I don't want to do the same thing with Filterlincs. mark

Sorry.. this post came up just as I made my last entry. ELA - I have a similar situation in my home as far as an oddball run. My recent changes are the end result of a substantial renovation. We gutted our kitchen, living room, dining area etc. While the drywall was out I ran new circuits for my lighting and outlets. All are home runs back to the panel - all are 14/2 and are all grounded properly. When I went around measuring the voltages at the outlets making a map of which outlets were on which breakers I noted that one line only measured 114V while the outlet right next to it measured the usual 117. Indeed all the outlets in the room measured 117 EXCEPT for that one which measured 114. All the runs were the same length within a few feet. I could literally see the wire running all the way back to the panel with no other loads on it so I knew there was no load that was causing this. I've not come up with a solution to why this is so but I speculate that the breaker on that line may not be making perfect contact. That or one of the conductors in the wire is damaged. My technical experience is in computer software and not in electrical engineering so I couldn't diagnose this if you delivered a pallet full of diagnostic equipment. Anyways - I just offer that up because your story reminded me of this. mark

Thanks for the responses. I think you misunderstood me, Lee, regarding the breakers. I wasn't implying that a breaker would block any kind of noise. What I was trying to say was that I see the house as a series of circuits all running in parallel. When a signal is injected into the line from the PLM it will follow along the circuit it's on and return to the panel where it will be distributed through the bus to all circuits in the home. With all circuits parallel to one another I couldn't see how a device on one circuit could matter to one on another as the PLM would have injected its message into the other circuit (indeed into ALL circuits) via the bus in the same manner that it got to the circuit in question. I guess I liken it to having 20 roads leading away from a central hub. Just because there's construction on one road shouldn't block you from driving down a different one. You may not be able to get to the houses at the end of the block where the construction is but there's no reason you shouldn't be able to get to all the houses on other blocks. If what ELA says is true - and there is some kind of resonant frequency or signal noise that a device generates - then all bets are off and the I can see how a device could have far reaching effects. But not so much as a signal 'sucker' but rather as a "global signal damager" if that makes sense. I'll go read your other posts ELA and see what you've been up to and measuring. mark

Right.. I'm familiar with how they're used. It's just the way I see the power flowing through the house makes me wonder how they perform. I see the power running through the house as a bunch of loops which all emanate from the panel. In each loop the power flows out from the bus through a breaker, through any devices on that circuit, and back to where neutral and ground peacefully coexist at the panel. Each loop should really be its own 'entity' with the only common spot being the bus. If that is the case (and I hope so as it's fundamental to my understanding of the circuits in my house) then I can see the function of a filterlinc only in the context of it preventing random device noise that looks/acts like Insteon messages from returning to the panel and distributing throughout the hosue. The notion of it preventing a device from being a 'signal sucker' only makes sense as it relates to devices downstream from the sucker on the same loop. The Insteon messages from devices on different loops (circuits) should be unaffected in strength by a device down either one. So this is why I'm curious as to how a filterlinc can act to strengthen an entire network. If it's acting to prevent noise injection by some devices then OK - I can see that. But preventing a device from 'absorbing' the signal only makes sense to me within one circuit. mark

Have you used your diagnostic tool to verify the difference between before and after installing a filterlinc? Does the filterlinc affect solely devices on the same breaker as it's installed or will it make a system-wide difference? I suppose that would depend on how many other Insteon devices are on the network repeating the messages. I guess what I'm getting at is if you had an LCD TV and Sat receiver on a home run would a filterlinc still make a difference to overall system message quality? mark

Well, you see, now there's another little 'rub' that got me a few years back. I'd initially purchased quite a few boosterlincs to augment my x-10 signal. Turns out those were not insteon-friendly. Of course the fine people at Smarthome now make a new boosterlinc that IS insteon friendly. That's great but it doesn't do much for the coupla hundred dollars worth of boosterlincs I can't use. I know that being on the bleeding edge can be an expensive place to stand but one does become 'gun shy' after a few thousand dollars. mark

Well, I guess what it comes down to for me, oberkc, is a reluctance to spend any money on filters. Having had a very large X-10 installation which I've only recently completed switching over to Insteon I'm far from convinced of the efficacy of filters. Despite signal bridges, amplifiers, filters and boosters my X-10 installation never worked to my satisfaction. I have a huge collection - over 200 or so X-10 devices - all sitting in a box - all worthless - as a reminder of my days of throwing money at the problem. In my particular case I was able to simply route the power source to the switchlinc from a different breaker. That resolved the problem instantly. There were numerous other devices on the first circuit that I was using but at over $30 per filter I'm not inclined to dump a few hundred dollars into this problem when an hour or so of rewiring has the desired effect. Of course each person's situation is different and in my case this was the most direct approach. YMMV. mark

Well, my problem is now resolved. First off, thanks, ELA for posting those traces. That's useful information to keep in mind while troubleshooting. I disconnected the LED's and connected a standard incandescent bulb to the switch as a test. As the insteon device was a switchlinc I didn't expect this to make a difference but Insteon has taken me by surprise on more than one occasion. There was no difference in the lag with an incandescent bulb attached. I also noted that ISY was having difficulty querying this device. I then disconnected the switchlinc from the circuit it was on and connected it to a different circuit. The lag immediately went away and query worked as expected. So... the long and the short of it is that the circuit it was on seems to have some communications difficulty. In this case it was an easy fix as it was in my media closet not 18" from the panel so it was a simple task to switch it around. I could see this being a royal PITA were this somewhere else in the house, though. I do have other areas in the house that cause me difficulty and will keep this experience in mind as I troubleshoot. It's a shame there's no easy way to connect a device somewhere in the house and diagnose Insteon connection difficulties. Between faulty insteon devices, poor communication areas, poor signal bridging, and the occasional lapse in programming/understanding it can get to be pretty time-consuming to find a problem that might not even be something that can be fixed. Thanks for the help, mark

Thanks, Mike, I can try doing that - I can simply disconnect the LED transformers (4 of them) temporarily and hook up a trouble light. I've got a charity golf tournament to go to today and tomorrow (I love summer!) but will try and do that tomorrow eve and post back. Thanks for the input, mark

Thanks, Lee, I always appreciate your posts. I've read that pdf file several times - or at least tried to. It reminds me very much of Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time'. I get about halfway through thinking I've got it but then it starts to slip away. The lag is still there regardless of the ioLinc. I'm going to move the LED's onto a different circuit and see if that matters. It's doubly confusing as I have to listen for the Switchlinc 'click' and ignore the LED lights as there's a lag between when the switch turns on, the transformer powers up, and the LED's glow. Oddly there's much less lag on an off command - almost none, really. mark

Well, now I'm not entirely sure as the lag is still there, though subjectively less. I think I'm gonna put the LED lights on a different circuit and see if that helps. They act very oddly on that circuit. If I cycle them on/off too quickly (and I don't mean very quickly - just on - 2 second pause - off - 2 second pause - on etc.) They fall out of sync with what I'm doing. This looks very much like what you were describing, Lee. How long do Insteon switches wait for an Ack before rebroadcasting? That might shed some light on this. mark

Well, that was interesting. I disconnected the LED's and found it made no difference to the lag. So I checked the leg it was connected to and noted an ioLinc plugged in to an outlet on that leg. I unplugged the ioLinc and the lag went away. That seems kinda counterintuitive as I would not have expected the ioLinc to cause a problem. Perhaps there's a problem with this particular ioLinc. Thanks for the help, Lee. I'm not certain what caused the problem but at least it's gone away. mark

Thanks, Lee, I'll give that a try. I thought perhaps it had something to do with the LED transformer load and maybe others had experienced a similar situation. Oddly if I turn it on and off from the ISY interface it responds quickly though repeated on/off cycles in close succession seems to 'confuse' it. That would support the idea of the ACKs not being received quickly. makr

I just installed 4 banks of LED lighting which I'm controlling through an Insteon scene. I've run into a strange issue which I've never encountered before and don't understand. The lights are all connected to a 2475S2 inlinelinc. I just switched it to this from a 2476S dimmer to make sure the problem wasn't somehow ramp rate related. The scene has 4 controllers - all keypadlincs - 3 are brand new kpl8's with the latest rev firmware and one is a couple of years old. The LED light switch is the only responder in the scene. When I turn the scene on from any of the controllers there's a several second lag before the switch turns on. Same thing when it turns off. It's reminiscent of how some of my x-10 used to work. Any thoughts as to why there might be this lag? mark

Well, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the service I got from Aartech here in Canada today. They offered to replace both my PLM's with new 2413s even though the warranty was up on one of them. I wanted to post this because I know that I wouldn't hesitate to post if a supplier screwed me over. It seems only fair to post when one treats me nicer than I expected. mark

The quirkiest thing that really set me looking more closely was when the lights in my son's bedroom wouldn't turn off. You'd flip the switch and they'd turn off but within 5 seconds they'd turn back on. There were no motion sensors related to the room and no programs that could be doing it so it was a real hair-puller. At first I attributed it to the fact that those are among the only 'Icon' switches I have. I thought perhaps I'd 'gotten what I'd paid for' as I've noticed that the quality of Icon is considerably less than that of the Smartlinc switches. I've also noted that the ISY interface would crash quite regularly when the PLM was acting up. It 'looked' ok but many devices would sit there with the pending write icon beside them but I couldn't get them to write and when I'd try to close the interface it wouldn't close. I think I'll order a spare PLM this time as it's a real headache when things go for a dump like this. mark

The power supply issue looks pretty trivial - the ISY looks to have a standard plugin for a 9V wall-wart. I'm actually kinda looking forward to that change as I can plug the ISY into a UPS. It's a shame there's no way to filter the power to the 2412 or 2413 as I suspect it's surges that are taking their toll on the units. Thanks for the tip on the simplehomenet version. I think I'm gonna try the 2413 first, though. I suspect I can reconfigure my network to reduce the number of links. The advertising for it claims faster writes (though I would think there's a lot more involved in write speed than the qualities of the PLM). Mostly it kinda chokes me that I've had two of them fail already. When the PLM goes flaky all the scenes start to act up and I chase my tail for a week or two reestablishing links both through ISY and manually until I finally clue in to the 'real problem'. As I'm in Canada the warranty is all well and good but by the time I pay shipping and taxes for the bad one going back and the replacement coming here I may as well just buy a new one.

I've had my ISY for a couple of years now. My first PLM was a 2412S rev 3.3. It started acting quirky a year or so ago and I was getting poor communication and failed writes. I bought a new 2412S which turned out to be a rev 3.1 (don't ask me - must have been old stock?) It worked fine until last week. Last week that one failed completely to the point where ISY only starts in safe mode. I've reverted to my old PLM to get up and running again. To be honest I'd forgotten it wasn't working right so I pulled my hair out for a couple of days trying to troubleshoot the problems. I remember now, though, that it was fubar so I've given up on using it. Has anyone else had issues with PLM failure/bad PLM function? I know they've dropped the 2412S in favor of the 2413S now. I'm hoping it's more reliable as 2 PLMs in 2 years seems unreasonable. I haven't read the specs on the 2413 but I remember when they first came out they were capable of far fewer links than the 2412. I hope that's not the case now as my 2412 had well over a thousand links in it. mark

I've had my ISY for a couple of years now. My first PLM was a 2412S rev 3.3. It started acting quirky a year or so ago and I was getting poor communication and failed writes. I bought a new 2412S which turned out to be a rev 3.1 (don't ask me - must have been old stock?) It worked fine until last week. Last week that one failed completely to the point where ISY only starts in safe mode. I've reverted to my old PLM to get up and running again. To be honest I'd forgotten it wasn't working right so I pulled my hair out for a couple of days trying to troubleshoot the problems. I remember now, though, that it was fubar so I've given up on using it. Has anyone else had issues with PLM failure/bad PLM function? I know they've dropped the 2412S in favor of the 2413S now. I'm hoping it's more reliable as 2 PLMs in 2 years seems unreasonable. I haven't read the specs on the 2413 but I remember when they first came out they were capable of far fewer links than the 2412. I hope that's not the case now as my 2412 had well over a thousand links in it. mark

I have a reasonably large installation - about 125 Insteon devices at the moment not including motion sensors, remote lincs, access points, and signal bridges. The devices are extensively cross linked in large and complex scenes. It's the result of years of work and it works pretty much perfectly. I'm doing a major reno of the house right now and that involves lights not being where they once were, switches moving or becoming redundant and new switches and devices being added. Without the ISY removing a device and reconfiguring it was a HUGE task - one that invariably resulted in numerous switches 'blinking' as they looked for links that no longer existed. With the ISY it's as simple as deleting the device and then adding it back in - I can accomplish in a few minutes what would take me hours to do otherwise. ISY handles all the grunt work of dealing with the links. Thanks for that! When a product can simplify your life that much you know it's well thought out and designed - and when it's supported as well as this product is you have a real winner. mark

The http to https thing was what was messing me up. I've done lots with http but nothing with https. I'd assumed that if I browsed to a secure site via http it would refer me automagically to the https version but as I see now that's apparently not so. My carrier blocking non-standard ports is interesting too.... I'll have to contact them and find out if they block all or leave some for folks like us who port forward in to many different devices.

Good one, Brad! I changed to use the standard port 80 redirected to the non-secure ISY port on 80 and it got in right away. Then I tried forwarding 80 to the secure port on 443 via an http request (not https) and got the same error as before Next I tried forwarding 80 to 443 using an https request and that worked fine. Finally I tried external 443 to internal 443. http request doesn't work - https request does. So it seems that a) my carrier is blocking non-standard ports but 80 and 443 work fine. my bb browser won't forward an http request to an https server Thanks for the direction, Brad! mark

I can access my ISY from remote via web no problem. https:\\70.67.xxx.xxx:801 with a port forward in my router to port 192.168.xxx.xxx:443 where my ISY resides. For testing purposes I've also set up a port forward to port 80 so that http:\\70.67.xxx.xxx:806 forwards to 192.168.xxx.xxx:80. Both of these forwards work fine from any PC based web browser. For some reason, though, if I try to browse to that from my blackberry or from my buddy's iphone I get a gateway error. I can't connect from either of these devices. I don't have the iphone in my hands but the error on the bb is 'the selected server returned an error when attempting to fulfill your request'. Sometimes I get the message 'Gateway Timeout - The gateway timed out while waiting for a response from the server. Please try loading a different page'. If I ask for details of the message it tells me that the connection failed and that the system returned 'connection refused' I've telnetted in to the ISY and upped both the HTTP and HTTPS timeouts to max - 50,000ms. No difference. I've enabled and disabled java support on the bb browser (I saw something about this in another post) but no difference. Could this just be crappy 3g performance in my area? Or is there something else I'm missing? Thanks, mark

You want to use the status condition for your second condition - I imagine what you want is if the sensor is off and the switch is off then turn the light on You should have it read OR Control 'garage sensor is switched off' and status 'kitchen' is not on that will turn the light on if the sensor times out and AND kitchen is off. if that's not what you want - it may be that you want or status 'garage sensor' is off and status kitchen is off this will turn it on if both the sensor and the kitchen switch are off Note that this will not pay any attention to the time of day. If you want to know if it's dark you could also query the motion sensor dusk/dawn sensor to check. control ifs are only evaluated when they are sent by physically pressing the button and only if the right 'side' of the button is pressed - ie each time you press the on it will execute regardless of whether it is already on status ifs are evaluated everytime it switches state. So if it turns on or off either the then or the else will happen. But if it's off and you send another off nothing will happen at all - likewise if you send an on and it's already on - nothing will happen at all. ' an 'if control is switched on do this ELSE do that' will NEVER execute the 'else' part. To execute the 'else' part you'd need an 'if control is switched off' statement and put the actions in the THEN portion mark