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Thanks Apnar, What you say seems to make sense and explains why we'd need V3 over V2. But in my frenzy to try to get this working, I forgot that I am not using the ISY portal, I am using the mobilinc portal - just another complicating factor. I sent a question off to Mobilinc to see why my ISY devices don't show up as devices in Alexa. Thanks again, Bob

Nathan, Thanks for the response. 1) I am not using V3 yet. I saw a recent post of someone saying they went thru the steps (forgetting devices, deleting V2, installing V3, discovering) and it diidn’t work for them. I will track that down before I switch over. But again, this feature is an ALEXA feature, it should have nothing to do with the version of ISY interface. And that leads to your next item. I couldn’t figure out what the 2 different symbols in the Alexa app meant. (And I’m still a little fuzzy.) looking at the Alexa app devices page, the only things that come up looking like light bulbs are my LIFX bulbs and strips. All the other devices on that page (that look like little houses) appear to be ISY scenes (although I am not 100% sure of that.) In the ISY I obviously have many devices (insteon switches and dimmers that control bulbs). And for the most I have created a scene for every single switch and some scenes that control multiple switche because somewhere on this forum, someone said its better to control things through scenes. Alexa seems to have pulled in some scenes, but not all. Everything on the Alexa app scenes page appears to be a LIFX scene or a LUTRON scene - I don’t see any ISY scenes there. And everything on the alexa app groups page are just groups I’ve created in the Alexa app. So I don’t doubt your statement, “then something isn’t set up right.” I just don’t know what is wrong or how to fix it. Thanks again.

Thanks Stu, I was trying to avoid setting up multiple accounts to accomplish this. Amazon’s documentation of the feature does not mention multiple accounts, so I assume they also expect it to work without going through that effort. BTW: Besides all the extra work of creating email addresses, creating multi[ple Amazon accounts, moving devices out of the main account and into the sub accounts, are there any other downsides to doing that? And conversely, are there any other upsides to doing it (in addition to having each rooms alexa device having that simplified interface. Thanks again.

I also could not make s SMART HOME GROUP work by simply saying “Alexa, turn on the lights” even though I had an Alexa device in the smart group. I had to call Amazon on a separate issue tonight and asked them houw this is supposed to work. They explained that you must say the name of the smart home group. For instance, if your snart home group name is “Bedroom lights” and it consists of an Alexa device and one or more lights or light scenes, you must say “Alexa, turn on Bedroom lights”, you cannot just say “Alexa, turn on the lights”, They asked me to send them where in their documentation a clarification is needed, which I did. I also explained that this feature is not really a feature at all. If I have to use the full name of the group to activate it, I can do that without including an Alexa device in the group.

Thank you Michel. That seemed to do the trick. I thought I had used that command before, but perhaps I had something in lower case. Regards, Bob

That didn't work either...I still get the error.

varinit.1 is52 bytes while varinit.2 is 84. So if RF is case sensitive, what is the right case for both the /conf and the /varinit? Thank you.

More info. If I put a trailing / on the command, it seems to accept the command ( rf /conf/varinit.1/ )(i.e., I don't get an error message), but if I do an LS /conf both before and after executing that command, the varinit.1 file is still there, so it doesn't seem to delete it.

Thank You Michel, But then I get an error saying "cannot delete VARINIT.1. I tried issuing the command with lower case /conf/varinit.1 and upper case /CONF/VARINIT.1 and a mix /CONF/varinit.1....and they all gave me the same error (I am not sure if capitalization is important or not.

Hi I just made some changes to my devices in my ISY device list. Specifically, I deleted 3 devices that I am no longer using. I went to backup after making the changes and got the error message in the title. Can someone tell me how to handle that. I would like to have a stable backup. Thanks, Bob

Larryllix, I am in the market to buy 3 color changeable bulbs (2 high hats and 1 standard bulb) that I would like to control from my ISY via the NR capability. The threads I have read (including this one) are so confusing that I can't figure out what to buy. Can you help me by providing an example of bulbs, and controllers that would make the most sense for me. I don't want to buy an RPI or anything else to program, just some bulbs that I can control the color of thru ISY - mostly on timed events. Thanks, Bob

I purchased the portal. And my lutron shades are lutron proprietary, not z-wave. But there is a section of the wiki that talks about integrating with the lutron hub...its just that its not a detailed description of what to do, so I don't know how to implement what it is telling me. Thanks

I have my isy controlling about 90% of the lights in the house using various insteon switches, dimmers,and KPLs. I have recently added an Amazon echo and bought the network module for the ISY and can control many of these things via the echo. I also just enclosed my lanai and installed 8 lutron shades with the lutron caseta smartbridge pro which allows me to control the shades via an app on my iphone. ( I haven't tried to control the shade from the ISY using the network resource cause the instructions in the wiki and in other threads are too cryptic. I sent away for some MI-lights and a controller and remote but apparently they are literally on a slow boat from China - expected to be delivered sometime within the next month. I plan to put these in the lanai to replace some existing high hat bulbs which are currently controlled by an insteon dimmer and ISY. Whew. So my questions are: When I get the MI-LIGHTs, should I leave the insteon dimmer to turn them on or off or 1)remove the switch entirely (leaving them powered on all the time) since I think it might be controllable from the ISY through the MI-LIGHT controller or 2) should I replace the insteon dimmer with a lutron dimmer (which I already have) making the whole room lutron controlled? Or is there something else I should consider. I am struggling with "if the MI-LIGHTs are on a switch (insteon or lutron) AND have their own controller, then in the ISY, do I have to turn on the switch, then issue the color commands?" At some point I will probably ask for help integrating the lutron into the ISY because the Lutron app doesn't do all the things that I'd like, but that's much farther downstream. Thanks

Thank you. That did the trick!

I am trying to do the following: 1)I have an open/close sensor on a garage screen door. The sensor is ON when the screen door is open and OFF when the screen door is closed. 2) I have a blank KPL switch that I want to use as an indicator for the screen door. BUT I want the button to light up when the screen is closed and turn off when the screen is open (the opposite of the way the sensor works.) 3) Since I want the logic to be "reversed", I cannot use a scene because then the button will light when the door is open and vice versa. 4) I created two programs "Screen open" and "screen closed" that trigger when the screen opens and closes. (These work OK because I have them sending me a notification.) But when I try to add the KPL switch to the THEN , it only allows me to set the backlight level of the KPL. It doesn't allow me to say KPL.button.C ON or KPL.button.C OFF. How can I get the behavior I am looking for? Thanks, Bob

Thanks for the suggestion to use a previous backup, but I had an insteon device failure since my last backup and had to replace the device, so I didn't think the restore would work correctly. I ended up deleting the device and adding it back in. In the process, I found 4 other devices that needed to be deleted and added back in order for the backup to finally succeed. It seems that everytime I go away (which is when I really want this system to work properly) something happens and I spend hours trying to get it back to a working state again...oh well, that's life. Thanks, Bob

I rebooted the controller and tried to do a backup and got the same error. Thanks for all the help. Perhaps tomorrow I will delete the device and add it back as Jon has suggested. Thanks, Bob

I got a "could not read that file" error when trying to do a restore. So then I tried to write updates to the device, but it just sits there and doesn't seem to do anything.

it is a KPL. And since I now know that the file relates to that device, I tried to restore that KPL, and immediate got an error saying that it couldn't read that same file name, so the restore failed.

I don't think so...I have 100% insteon devices, some old but most new (dual mode), including 2 insteon motion detectors, and a garage door sensor/trigger. I can't think of anything that is 3rd party, can you give me an example of such a device? Thanks, Bob

I went to perform a backup today and at about the 40% mark, I got the following errors: "cannot create the zip file" and "could not retrieve file /conf/228c40.rec". Then I decided to reload java (it was one version old), so I loaded the newest version, cleared the java cache, and restarted the console - and got the same problem when I tried to do a backup again. I am running 4.3.26 on the latest version of safari. Any ideas what I should try next? Thanks, Bob

To answer LeeG's question: The names of the 5 KPL nodes are: Kitchen KPL.All Kitchen Lights Cove Lt KPL.Pendant Button Kitchen KPL.Entry Button Kitchen KPL.Home Button Kitchen KPL. garage door button And now I see why the pendant button didn't show up...it's got the wrong name. So I just changed it to Kitchen KPL.Pendant button and all is well Thanks for all the help. Regards, Bob

four. And I think that fixed it...the missing switch is now there. Thanks And as a matter of style, is grouping the switches of a KPL together a good way to keep track of physical switches and their underlying functional buttons?

Thanks - It appears that I have a little over 100 devices and scenes in total. I was easily able to create a new "test" scene with no errors. I am thinking of upgrading to PRO anyway, but at this point would probably wait until I have the current system working the way I want it to before I upgrade. I just double checked the functionality of every button on the new switch and it appears to be working 100% correctly even though the "B" switch doesn't show up in the console...very strange.

Thanks...I believe they are the same type of device (5 button dimmer KPLs) - you can't buy the old one's anymore. In any case, what is interesting is that the button which wasn't showing up in the console on the old device and now is not showing up on the console with the new device WORKS correctly - exactly as it did with the old device. So even though I can't see it in the console, it did transfer from the old switch to the new switch correctly. So in order to delete the device and reestablish scenes and programs, is there a way to "print out" all the scenes that each switch is used in and more importantly, each program that uses each switch? Or do I have to write it all down? Thanks again.