mlennox

Wow, this was really helpful and has changed my thinking about how to create programs. Thanks dnl!

Hi Michel, I think it was just a coincidence. I opened up the motion sensor and found that the battery terminal connection was very loose. I squeezed it tighter, reset and re-linked the device to ISY and now it seems to be operating properly... I'm guessing the cold temperatures in the garage may have made for a loose connection to the battery... I'll keep an eye on it and see what happens.

I'm having a weird problem with one of my motion sensors and/or programs that may coincide with the recent firmware upgrade, or may not. Just looking for direction. I have a program that sends an e-mail notice to me when a motion sensor is triggered on. I have the motion sensor set for a 30 second timeout and nothing has changed on the sensor side of things. What's happening is that after motion is sensed, I'm getting spammed for about 10-15 minutes (every minute) with an email alert even after all motion has stopped.

Thanks Mark, That's helpful, and kind of what I figured. I certainly don't mind tinkering, in fact I enjoy it, but since I may not have time to do this for several months, I may just go with the Hunter Controller for the time being and change later. As long as I have access to the valve wire leads I can always switch later. What about the rain sensor, or any of the other possible sensor add-ons? Can the EZFlora and/or ISY use these sensors for additional insight on top of WeatherBug?

I'm about to hire a contractor to install a 6 zone irrigation system at my house, which includes a Hunter Pro-C Timer/Controller and an outdoor rain sensor. Ultimately I will want to control the system through INSTEON commands with my ISY-99i controller. My question is what do I need to make this happen. I've seen the EZFlora product, is this supported by ISY-99i and are there programming templates for this? Should I bother with the Hunter Pro-C? What about the rain sensor? Are there other sensors I should consider or is WeatherBug the way to go? I believe the Pro-C controller has some sort of optional IR interface that can be attached for integration with home automation systems. Any other advise or tips I should consider? Thanks in advance.

I would like to see EZUIRT support, unless somebody can suggest another way to have IR blasting from any location controlled by INSTEON.

I'm curious what this would mean should you be given the green light to proceed. I'm assuming one would need to purchase a new ISY with the chip included in order to get the functionality?

Unfortunately I have a ton of more "important" things to get done. I've discovered it's a bad idea to purchase a whole bunch of Insteon devices before you've finished construction of your home... Playing with ISY and dimmers is way more fun, so the more "important" jobs are not getting done.

Thanks for this, I will have to digest this a bit but I think I get the picture. It's a bit "complicated" and I'm really hoping that the variables implementation will simplify these types of programs greatly.

This is a fine suggestion, but I'm not seeing how it really helps to figure out what scenes/devices/lights were on and at what dim level so that they can be put back to the same intensity upon motion. Are you suggesting there is a way to "cancel" a dim operation that is in progress such that the lights will return to where they were? Really what I'd like to do is use one of the lights in the room to trigger some sort of warning signal, but then return it to its previous state.

I have several scenes in my master bathroom along with a motion sensor that I use to turn lights and fans off after 5 minutes. There are certain instance where someone is in the bathroom but not triggering the motion sensor (in the shower, in the bathtub, etc.). What I would like to do is provide a 15 second grace period after my program turns off all the scenes, whereby if somebody is the bathroom, they can simply trigger the motion sensor and all the lights and devices would re-activate to where they were. Is this even possible? I don't see a way to store dim levels in variables that can then be re-set?

Actually, I think this is what got me into trouble in the first place. I believe this "check box" to apply settings to all devices has a bug. For me it didn't apply the settings to all devices, though immediately afterwards it did appear so. When I went back to each individual device I noticed it wasn't set properly and had to revert to setting each one individually. Agreed. There are a lot of options for sure, and I would be the last one to complain about having too much flexibility. I'm only 2 weeks into this so perhaps this is just a learning curve issue.

You are correct. I was able to get it to work as a responder in the scene. I think I had the switch settings set incorrectly in the scene. I'm finding the virtual n-way setup to be a little confusing and tedious, since you have to set the on level and ramp rates exactly the same on all switches if you want them to "behave" the same. For multi-way switches I would prefer if you could simply "slave" switches to the main switch such that the slaves would mimic the main switch on level and ramp rate.

I tried that but was not able to get the correct behaviour from the physical switch that I was looking for. I disagree that inlinc dimmers can't be controllers since they actually do have physical on/off switches that behave exactly the same as the switchlinc dimmer paddes. At any rate, I was able to work around the problem by manually adding the inline dimmers to ISY masquerading as regular SwitchLinc dimmers. ISY sees them as regular SLs, and allows them to be controllers, so they now behave as I would expect. Since I was able to add them as controllers to a scene, I'm assuming this is a bug in ISY.

Hello, I have a set of lights controlled by an inline linc dimmer module and a secondary physical dimmer switch. I had to use the inline linc because the physical switch location did not have a separate neutral wire. I'm trying to now create a virtual 3-way scene with the inline and physical dimmer but for some reason ISY does not give me the option to add the inline as a controller, only a responder. For n-way virtual wiring I understand all switches need to be added as controllers to the scene. What gives?