eric_allman

Just to get some closure on this: I ended up deleting and restoring all of the devices. This was a pain in the you-know-what, but everything seems to be working again, and there was even a silver lining. It forced me to look hard at stuff that accreted over the years — scenes that were unused, setups that could be simplified, etc. The only lingering problem is that I can't seem to get my IRlinc working again, but that is much less important than it used to be. Overall my system is much neater and easier to maintain (at least so far). Thanks to everyone who helped out!

@IndyMike Thanks for the feedback. I have resigned myself to deleting and recreating all devices, one at a time. The ones that are not in complex scenes are easy, but since there seems to be no good way of summarizing scenes (including on levels, ramp rates, etc.) in a printable form, it's a bit of a slog for the devices in more complex scenes. But at least things are getting better (so far). I'm still having problems setting up parameters for scenes (on level, ramp rate, etc.) but that's a different topic. Thanks for the advice. I'll be back if I get stuck again.

I was hoping to avoid factory resetting everything, but I suspected that isn't an option for me, sigh. So far as I can tell, there are no links to orphaned devices EXCEPT for the old PLM. I know that pretty much anything can be controlled if the address is known. Insteon is not designed for security, and in fact I can control some (but not all) of the devices from the ISY. I did check and find that every device seems to have at least one entry in the link table that refers to the PLM. I assume that they have it as a responder, but I don't know how to read the link table to verify that. At this point I can't seem to reproduce the activity appearing even when nothing happens. One odd thing that I noticed when working on this: in some cases I can turn on a scene (by which I mean that the ISY thinks it has turned on) with Fast On but not with On. Off and Fast Off both work. Yes, I know that you have to control secondary buttons through scenes, but that isn't working. Here is the link table for one of my keypadlincs: Controls A and C do not directly control anything (but programs look at them). B and D do control other devices. I've been accused of not being in my right mind as well, but I also understand that this would be like juggling running chainsaws. The main problem is that I have to restore any scenes that a deleted device participates in. Frankly I'm not confident that I have good communication, although as near as I can tell devices can communicate with each other. Well, that's a relief. I'm hoping that I don't need to buy yet another PLM. I think I have four of them at this point, three (and perhaps four) of which are non-functional. Thanks for your feedback.

At some point I tried to upgrade the firmware and UI, but it failed. At the time (quite a while back) it didn't seem urgent so I abandoned the project. I do like to stay up to date though, so I should add that back to the list for later. PLM INFO does have the address matching what is printed on the PLM. Clearing the cache and restoring devices seems to have made some difference, but it's even weirder now: on one of my keypads, one of the buttons works (and reports to the ISY) but the other three do not report to the ISY, although they do control devices to which they are linked. Also, when I did the restore the progress bar only went to 3%, at which point it finished without error.

Techman, thanks for the quick response. Firmware and AI are both Insteon_UD994 v4.9.0 ( 2020-12-22-11:51:19 ) I have an ISY backup from before I updated this, but at this point it isn't current. In particular, there are some devices that I had to replace after I installed the new PLM. I've had both single- and dual-band devices die. Most of them were Icon switches, but I've had particularly bad luck with PLMs. I think I'm my fourth one now. I'm not sure of the age of my ISY, but it has been several years. I upgraded from an ISY 99. I vaguely recall replacing the SD card because I needed more space, but I'm not certain about that. As I said in my earlier posting, I'm not at all sure I followed the instructions precisely. Given how many times I've had to replace them, it's not impossible that I got sloppy. eric

Add me to the list of folks having problems after a PLM replacement, and because I've had many PLM failures, it's probably the case that I screwed up one of the updates, so please don't tell me to "read the fine manual" — I've done that, mea culpa. My issues seem to be weird enough that I suspect that there may be multiple contributing factors: All device link tables have at least one link to the new PLM, but some of them also have links to what I believe to be the old PLM. The old one is dead and the address is not printed on it, so I can't verify that, but I have reason to believe it is true. Note that the ISY version of the link tables do match the devices, so resetting and restoring from a backup is just going to leave me in the same place. The ISY can query and control every device (mostly, see below), but doesn't update it's status when activity occurs (e.g., manually turning on a switch doesn't show up in the admin console. Note however that the Event Viewer does show that it receives protocol. I still haven't been able to understand the details of the Event Viewer, despite doing a lot of reading. The exception is the secondary buttons (A, B, C, and D) on keypadlincs, which can not be queried or updated. The primary on/off buttons can do both. But if I set up a scene (through the ISY) such that one button controls another, it works locally. Several other mysteries exist that I hope will be resolved when I fix other things. So, my questions are: Is there some way to repair the link tables, i.e., remove entries that link to devices that have died, of which there have been a disturbing number? Or do I just need to factory reset everything and start over? Is there any explanation for why the primary circuit on the keypadlincs work (sort of) but the secondary buttons do not? Any other sage advice would be appreciated. There's probably something more in the Forum already but I wasn't able to find it. eric

Xathros, thanks for the tip. That worked fine (and is really obvious; I'm somewhat embarrassed). I was able to reduce this to one program by using the "on" part in the Then clause and the "off" part in the Else clause, but other than that it's the same thing. Thanks again.

I've got a fireplace with a fan with thermostat, so that the fan automatically turns on when the fire heats up and off when the fire turns off. I've installed a In-LineLinc Relay With Sense inside the fan so I can tell when the fan turns on and off, and have a program that turns on other fans in the room to get the air moving. The problem is that when the thermostat turns off it "jitters" — that is, it turns off-on-off-on-off in a period of about ten seconds. I want my program to block for a short period after the first "off" so it ignores this jitter. However, this is proving harder than I expected. Since the condition is evaluated even if the program is currently running (and apparently restarts), a simple 20 second wait doesn't work. I tried disabling the program at the start and re-enabling it at the end, but somehow the program still gets interrupted, so it doesn't get re-enabled. Is there some trick to make this work? eric