MarkJames

I dunno wtf has happened but it's starting to worry me. My system started coming up with 'cannot communicate with ' for every single device. I restarted the ISY and it came up in safe mode So I reset my PLM and reboot everything and ISY connected to it fine - no safe mode this time. But when it came up it took like an hour and a half going through every device getting an ERR 1 and putting an exclamation point beside each item it in my device tree. I have something like 140 devices so it took ages. So I reset and restored the PLM. It 'looked' like it quickly wrote PLM links with success msgs (it went by very quickly - maybe 2 seconds?) and gave me a reset PLM message. But when I do the diagnostic on my PLM and show PLM links table it's empty though it does show connected. So I figured my PLM might have issues - though ISY seems happy with it. I pulled out a brand new one (2.2 v9E) and plugged that in. I did a restore PLM on that and it looked/acted the same as the first time and again I have no PLM links in the table. I'm a bit stumped now. Any suggestions? I have no ISY communication with ANY of my devices. mark

I'll let you know how they work out. While I'd rather control them from my HA system I suppose the sensors in the different areas provide an 'out of the box' solution that is probably as elegant as anything I'd write after bumbling through it for a while. I have my hands full with other HA issues right now so I'm not inclined to pile even more on As it is my floor heat thermostats from Nuheat allow me to control them over the web but only through the mfr website. At least it fulfills my needs when it comes to travel/warming up the house before we get home. As of 5 minutes ago my new heat pump has just been powered up for the first time - it's wonderful! mark

Thanks - I'll order another Raspi and give it a whirl. Gotta get to it before the spring weather arrives up here in the great white North and I can get outside finally! I ended up ordering the 3 sensor ecobee bundle. It supported my heatpump with auxiliary heat and - surprisingly - it's made here in Canada! mark

That looks very interesting. You can control your Sonos from your HA system? That'd be worth it for me alone! How do I go about getting the upgraded firmware? I only see the 4.5 line of firmware in the relevant thread? mark

Can I ask a dumb question that I should probably spend some time researching but I'm up to my elbows in alligators and it's easier to just ask? What's nodelink do and why might I want to use it? Thanks! mark

Oh ok - that makes sense. My home used to do that too - 2 stories - all one zone on hot water baseboard. I broke it up into 3 zones using zone valves but then found that the original owner had run the pipes for the hot water up and down and back and forth so some zones had a room upstairs and a room downstairs on one zone. It was a bit of a mess. We've since changed to a mini split system after that one failed. I wish manufacturers would get away from this cloud thing and give us all APIs. mark

Do you have 4 zones? Or are you using them to control fewer zones? mark

It looks like I'm compatible - I just don't know what the functionality is from a HA controller without going through a cloud service. Setpoint? Schedule change? heat/cool mode? System on/off? setback? How much fuss is polyglot and nodelink? Nest are pretty cool - I'm just not sure how much more effort I want to put into this. mark

Thanks guys, When this heatpump goes in (today, I hope) I will have 3 different heating systems in the house and only one that I can deal with remotely. I have in floor electric heating in my kitchen and living room that are wifi controllable with Nuheat but their system is not accessible to IFTTT or any HA controllers (yet anyways). I don't care too much about this - the reaction time on floor heat is so very slow that it doesn't lend itself to any kind of occupancy control - more like a set and forget or disable while you're away. My kids rooms (they've moved away now), master bedroom, and media room are all on a Fujitsu DC motor heat pump system with individual room thermostats. These do some sort of proprietary communication with the Fujitsu master controller so they are not able to be controlled with my HA system either. That leaves the main living areas which will have the new heat pump that I can control however I want. Occupancy isn't really a big deal for me and the heatpump is a single zone so the Ecobee might not be right. For occupancy I've set up my system to watch for the wifi signal and bluetooth signals on both my phone and my wife's. Using that and Tasker, I set flags based on whether we're coming home or leaving based. All I really need to be able to do is turn the system on/off, *maybe* adjust setpoints, and possibly adjust the schedule if we're travelling. I've heard good things about zwave but if I got a zwave thermostat it would be the only zwave device I have. What kind of functionality do the insteon ones have? mark

Can you set temperature from within ISY? Not having one to add I can't see the functionality. Thanks, mark

So my home has always had proprietary thermostats that I couldn't control from a HA system (Fujitsu Halcyon and NuHeat). As of tomorrow, though, that will change in the main living areas. I'm having a new heat pump installed (Lennox) and that means I can go to a HA controllable thermostat! There are a lot of choices out there - does anyone have any advice as to which way to go? My stuff is pretty much all insteon and Elk (M1XSP and serial thermostats are lower on my list) but I'm not averse to picking up a Zwave dongle for my 994. I know nothing about Zigbee Any input is much appreciated. mark

lol - no argument from me. I love building things. Heck - I'm sitting here looking at monoprice 3d printers as I type. Why? I dunno - cuz they look cool. mark

lol - there's no arguing with someone who wants to build something. I built an elaborate coffee bean loader for my coffee roaster a couple of years ago using sheet stainless and RC servos along with a custom built enclosure for an interface to it using two custom made thermocouples, an arduino, a graphing LCD, and a dozen or so buttons and switches. I used it for a month before I forgot it outside and it filled with rain lol.

That's why mission critical devices like smoke detectors in monitored security installs have backup checks like relays on the line that indicate failure before the failure wipes you out.

I'm not sure why you polling the device would be any more prone to collisions than the device sending data to you. If anything you polling a device would give you a better chance of scheduling data retrieval when nothing else is going on hence avoiding collisions. When the device sends data to you you have no control over - and it knows nothing of - the current state of your network traffic. This seemed to be the problem with Insteon motion sensors - flooding your network with signals. Regardless - so long as there is some form of queuing going on I don't think it matters one way or the other.

lol - you're preaching to the choir. I live on Vancouver Island in BC. When my tag manager and tags showed up yesterday I had to pay the GST/PST and a $10 CanadaPost handling fee. That's a world better than the way UPS or FedEX rapes us, mind you. With the tag thing, though, you only buy the one tag manager. After that - yeah - maybe $30-50 CAD for a tag delivered. I guess time will tell. The other benefit to the tags (if you call it a benefit) is that they're battery powered so easier to put them in inconspicuous places. I built a beautiful Nixie tube clock a couple of years back and I can't find a place in the house to put it where I don't have a damned power cord running across a counter top. Drives me nuts! mark

I've built quite a few things with arduinos and pis - love those little things. I host my web page on a pi and have another one that polls my weather. Quite a few people are using them as HTPC's nowadays running plex, too. I can't help but think that in this case either of those would actually be more expensive than a premade product. Heck, a pi3 is somewhere around $40. Add a power supply and any light sensors you might want, tack on some shipping and you'll probably want an enclosure and you're easily upwards of $60. A CAO tag can be had for $25 and you don't have to code it or build it.

So how would you say they compare to a basic keypad lock. That's what I have on the doors that I generally come and go through. Do you use the zwave functionality in some way for that?

Those look very useful! I'm gonna check on those. Out of curiousity - how do you use your z-wave locks? I've pondered pulling the trigger on those a few times now but can't quite wrap my head around how I would benefit from them. mark

Do you like them? I've read mixed reviews from people on these. How do they report light? lux? percentage? something else? I've been tempted to put the zwave dongle into my 994i but I'm not sure what else I'd do with it other than perhaps door locks. mark

Yeah - I had nothing but trouble with those. I have 3 brand new ones in a drawer that I'm gonna but on eBay. I didn't like the battery life - and depending on where you mounted them they were awkward to change the batteries in. Plus I didn't find them attractive (though the new ones look better). They also only reported light/dark. I want something that can tell me HOW light or dark. I'm trying for 'so bright that lights that get turned on get shut off again' or 'bright - but maybe you want the lights on anyways so I'll leave the alone for half an hour' vs 'dark - lights get left alone' mark I'm familiar with the REST interface - I use it a lot - I'm just not sure how these tags send info to it? Do they have wifi built into them or what? mark

Those look really interesting. Small, good battery life and excellent range. So when you say via the REST interface - do they report to a website that I then scrape? Or can I get the data locally? What's involved in getting the info from them? Thanks!

Is anybody using any form of luminance/brightness detection in their HA system? I'd like to determine how bright a room is to decide if lights need to be turned on or off based on motion. Rather than deal with sunrise/sunset/time of day it would be ideal if I could just determine how bright the room is with the lights off and use that to decide if the lights should come on. The HSM200 looks like a reasonable fit for this job but it's Zwave which I don't have. I suppose for under $50 I could add it to my ISY.... There doesn't seem to be any environmental sensors for Insteon other than leak/motion/contact. I was hoping there would be something that might report luminance in lux as a dim level (0-255) or similar. Thanks! mark

Actually, I noticed something afterwards... My screen is a 32" BenQ (3840x2160). The popup box that the UI was putting up was too small for all the elements to show up so the 'normal' and the 'pump' buttons were superimposed and looked like 1 button. I stretched it out and they were both there all along. I'm not sure why these are buttons, though. Seems radio buttons would be a better choice here as this is an either/or proposition. mark

I'll go back and check my UI. I'm on 4.5.4 but my UI might be behind. Just to clarify - you see both the NORMAL and the PUMP choices? Thanks! [Edit] Confirmed - it works with the newer UI. Thanks! I hadn't considered that it would work with an older one and a newer one but not with the one I had. mark