steveng57

So I impulse bought a pack of Feit LED smart bulbs at Costco for decorating during the holidays. I am trying to set them up so that act and behave like any other ISY/Insteon based device, using the ISY to control the scenes/scheduling etc. In essence the Feit's would be a "virtual" light to the ISY, if such a thing existed. A node server would do the trick too, but that doesn't seem to be a thing either, here is what I did: Attached the Feit bulbs to Alexa/Echo and got them working there. Created a state variable is the ISY, and exposed it to Alexa as a Motion Sensor variable. Called it $Christmas_Bulbs Created two routines in the Alexa app, "Feit Bulbs On", and "Feit Bulbs Off" which do what their names suggest. In order to mimic these bulbs just being part of an Insteon scene as possible (so they are controlled by the same switches as the scene, same schedules etc.), it "attached" the state variable to one of the Insteon lights in the scene with the following code: To turn them on: If 'Christmas_Scene / Main Light' Status is not Off Then $Christmas_Bulbs = 1 Else -No action To turn them off: If 'Christmas_Scene / Main Light' Status is Off Then $Crhistmas_Bulbs = 0 Else - No action So this way, if "Main Light" goes on or off, it will set the state variable accordingly, which in turns sets the "Motion Sensor" in Alexa, which in turn runs the corresponding routine for on/off of the Feits. So if you have read this far, thanks! I am lookiing for some guidance if this is the best way to do this or there is something else that will do the trick better. This setup has two drawbacks: It can take over 30 seconds for the Feit bulbs to respond to all the signals above. When I turn the ISY scene on with a keypad, its a long wait for the Feits to come on. Not a deal breaker but kind of annoying. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to control the brightness with this method, its binary on/off. Again not a deal breaker but I would like to be able to do this. In a perfect world the Feit would be just another Insteon device to the ISY (needing the node server), or at least tie a state variable to the bulbs so setting the state variable to any value between 0 and 100 would set the Feits to on, off or a percentage dim in between. Thanks for any comments or suggestions.

So with the demise of the ZTH, what are folk doing for remote temperature sensing and management? I have a couple buildings out back that I need to know the temp of, but obviously do not need a full blown thermostat, as there is no furnace out there.

I had sold a home a few years back with a lot of HA in it, and it could not easily be pulled out. But my realtor put a clause in the contract saying "all HA is sold as is, with absolutely no warranty or support of any kind." At least that way you are legally protected.

So this is working nicely now that Canada is enabled. Seems there are a lot of us ISY users up here :-). This is an awesome skill! I've got it running in test mode, now going to apply it to some real-world scenarios. Note to ISY users: when cutting and pasting from the instructions above, I inadvertently copied a whitespace at the end of the hostname into the Resource manager..."api.notifymyecho.com ", which resulted in 403 (Forbidden) coming back from the server. Don't do that I took more than a couple minutes to find it. (This is an ISY / End user problem, not a Notify me problem). Nice work Randy, very cool.

ditto.

Thanks Benoit. Yeah I was just plain wrong about scenes. Thanks for the correction/clarification. Could use another: Does that mean we are recommended to add ISY "Scenes" as Echo "Lights" almost all the time? Seems adding them as Echo "scenes" has little value. Re the dimming thing...I've decided to solve my particular dimming problems another way...I already had "high, medium, and low" scenes for most of the rooms in my house, controlled by insteon keypad ABCD buttons anyway, so I just added those scenes to Echo with a bunch of spokens, ie. "Turn on Kitchen Lights High", "Turn on Kitchen Lights Low". etc Seems to work pretty well, and it was already intuitive to the family since they knew the buttons already. Also, for a couple of things like an Echo routine called "bedtime", it calls an ISY program (exposed as a "Light" to Echo) that turns off a bunch of scenes in the 'else' clause. There is nothing in the 'if' and nothing in the 'then' (I NEVER want all those scenes coming on at once :-)). Let me know if that's the recommended way to do it. It seems to work well enough, and MUCH faster than putting the scenes in the echo routine directly.

Interesting trick to change the type from scene to light. It might also solve a problem with "Alexa-enabled" groups, where you add an Echo to the group so you don't have to say the name all the time...Seems you can say just "Alexa, turn off the lights" with an Alexa-enabled group and it will turn off all the lights in that group, but it will not do anything to scenes. The drawback to setting the type from scene to light might be that one cannot say, "Alexa, dim the lights"...while Alexa might understand that, scenes cannot be dimmed, only set on or off.

True, makes sense. Having said that, I don't need to know the state of a scene in this scenario, I just need to be able to turn it on or off, and I don't care what it is currently set to. Is it the Alexa app that wants to know the state, its not me :-)?

Hi all, I think I may have found a bug with Echo groups and the ISY skill. Wondering if its just me or others are seeing it. I am running skill v3. Seems that whenever I create a group in the Echo/Alexa app, if I only put scenes in there, it doesn't register properly and none of the on/off settings are enabled, nor can I add it to a "routine". This only happens when a group is made entirely of "scenes". All the scenes are present, you just can't do anything with them. The problem goes away if the group has at least one "device" in it. This is my workaround of course, to just add a device from one of the already included scenes as a kind of dummy device to trick the app into working. Once I do that, all the scenes can be controlled on/off with the app and thru the Echo, and they can be assigned to a routine. This seems to be the case on the Alexa web app or the mobile app. This leads me to think that its a problem is with the skill and not the app.

So after reading this thread, I decided to add an adapter to my 2441zth, and go from battery to plugged, and indeed it does the things that Techman and others say. Importantly, you can query the device now, as well and set the Heat and Cool set points via ISY programs. So I can now programatically set the thing to a different set point at night and when I am away!! Very cool. Little tip: after reading the spec on the adapter it needed (it says 5v to 6v, 200mA (min)), I realized that most USB adapters are 5v. So I dove into my junk devices bin, found an old USB adapter, sure enough 5v and 500 mA. Then found a USB cable, not sure the actual type, but its the kind that goes from PC to a printer. I cut off the wires on one end, stripped the red and put it on the positive in the 24441zth, and did the same for the black on the negative. And viola, worked like a charm!!!

While its true that both methods will work (stusview and Oberskc), I have tried both and found the former to be the better method. Multiple, Individual scenes is a less error prone way to go, doing all that with a single scene in my world just got weird and they kept stepping on each other. Also, with individual scenes, you can set them programmatically from the ISY, but there is no way to tell the ISY to "set scene XYZ per the C button levels"

Awesome...its working like a charm Stu. Many thanks!!!

Sure, I get that the remote thermostat is completely indepentant of the main one. I have not linked them in any way. My question is more about the right way to program the the ISY so that is uses the "Heat Set Point" that a user might set on the remote to base its decisions instead of hardcoding the temperature to turn things on/off.

Finally getting around to setting this up for the winter. My problem is that the wired thermostats on the main floor will shut things off at 70 or 72, but the basement can still be as cold as 65 when that happens. So I want the small heater to augment the temp down there and bring it up to around 68, but it does not provide all the heat. It also has an analog thermostat on it that is set to around 70, so the worst that would happen if communications are lost with the ISY is that the basement would get a little warmer than it should. I also have an AWAY setting on it, so it doesn't come on at all if nobody is home. Thanks much guys! A question if I may though on programing it: My remote thermostat is named "Remote" (original I know) and right now, the mode is set to "off" my code is hardcoded to a certain temp and looks like this: If Status 'Thermostat / Remote Main' <= 68 (Temperature) and $Away is 0 Then Set Scene "Basement heater" On Else Set Scent "Basement heater" Off Whereas I would like to be able to use the heat set point on the remote thermostat to set the desired temp. How does one do that? Set the mode to auto and change the code to: If "Thermostat / Remote Heat Ctl" is witched On and $Away is 0 Then Set Scene "Basement heater" On Else Set Scent "Basement heater" Off Would that work?

Hi all, Got a new remote thermostat, the 2411zth. I've had the wired version controlling my home for a while. Bought this one to use to get data from the basement, need to control the temp and humidity down there. The instructions talk about setting it up to manually create a scene with with the master thermostat, but there are no guidelines on how to set this up with ISY. How does one do this? Add the device to ISY, then create a scene each for main, heat ctl, cool ctl, with both being controllers? or just a scene for main? I'd like the remote to be able to give an individual humidity level, so I don't want it to just be giving the output of the master or anything. Also, the ISY admin console doesn't seem to be reporting the temperature of the remote, but it does display the humidity. Not sure why this would be the case. Thanks in advance.