mwester

"Run Program" is not like calling a subroutine or function -- it is not intended to be synchronous to anything at all. It's more like launching a Windows service or a Linux daemon. A "WAIT" statement in your program may or may not result in you getting the correct value; it depends on all sorts of things including how busy the ISY is at that moment. In general, the ISY is an event-driven programming model -- it's regrettable (IMO) that they borrowed some concepts from procedural programming models, and forced them into that event-driven model (it doesn't work well and often confuses more than it helps). In such an event-driven system, if you want to model your "call subroutine" approach, you'd have to do it as below. (Note that there are probably better, more efficient ways to do this -- I'm just illustrating how to do the "call", not trying to build a specific optimal solution!) Program A: If Time is 12:00: Run Program "Calc Temp" Program Calc Temp: If <nothing>: <perform computations> <save result in STATE variable RESULT Program A2: If RESULT changes: <continue with whatever you wanted to do after the temperature was calulated>

Perhaps... but if one thinks in terms of "zoning" one's house, I think it's quite do-able. To some degree I've already done that on mine, separating by z-wave vs insteon. The key is to think of zones as defined by traffic and usage patterns rather than by physical rooms. That way the boundaries between the two make logical sense, and there's less cross-zone traffic to worry about.

ANYTHING with a switching power supply (which is basically anything manufactured in the last couple of decades) can be a noise source. Some are less, some (often the cheapo junk devices) are more so. Size or power-draw is irrelevant in my experience, although quality of the device is an indicator -- I've observed that a $9 Chinese knock-off phone charger was capable of taking every Insteon device on the first floor effectively out-of-service. Insteon's protocol was designed back when transformer-based power-supplies were the norm, and it has not scaled well in today's world, particularly given the "race to the bottom" in terms of price for electronic gizmos. Filterlincs will help -- I have my house littered with filterlincs. They sprout on every wall, often connected to power strips so I can use one expensive filterlinc to cover several devices -- which results in the house also being littered with extension cords and power strips, despite have plenty of unoccupied wall outlets everywhere. For a few troublesome wired devices, I use the 20A X10 in-line filter. Despite all those efforts, I still have marginal comms. But at least no flickering of lights. My advice: switch to Z-Wave. Works well with the ISY, and unlike the Insteon protocol (and I fear, the company itself), Z-Wave has a future. It's not perfect, and not a panacea, but once you have a "critical mass" of always-on devices to form the mesh, it's reliable and just works, and far faster than Insteon, plus it has a lot more "cool" devices.

For generic hall-effect flow sensors, one applies +5 volts to the red wire, ground is connected to the black wire, and the yellow wire goes to the input pin for a microprocessor such as an arduino or an ESP8266 (or ESP32) -- the pin should be configured as a input with a pull-up. Each revolution of the spinning magnet inside the flow sensor will cause a momentary pulse (from logic 1 to logic 0 and back to logic 1) on the input pin. Counting those pulses and computing how many per second will yield the flow rate. One way to get this information to the ISY would be to connect an output pin from that same microprocessor to an IOLinc, and trigger the IOLinc when some threshold has been reached. Alternately, if the microprocessor has a network connection (ESP family, for example), you could program it to set a variable on the ISY to reflect the current state of the input logic pulses from the flow sensor. What you cannot do is connect the flow sensor directly to any Insteon device, or to the ISY. I'm not aware of any Z-Wave device that takes a hall-effect flow sensor input directly, but there might be one somewhere...

No google hits for that model...

What sort of flow sensor -- what signal does it send, at what voltage/current, etc?

Please read the topics suggested -- the argument about the range extender has been beaten into the dust in the past; it's a shame to waste good electrons re-hashing that all over again!

Yes, one adds z-wave devices from the ISY console. It will be very unlikely that your lock will communicate reliably without additional z-wave devices. You need a minimum number of devices to establish the mesh required for communications -- usually three or four, depending on the location of the ISY relative to the lock, and other factors. But never fewer than three always-on devices (and the lock is a battery-powered device, and thus is not "always-on" -- so it doesn't count).

Probably before you add the lock (they seem temperamental devices), it'd be best to install your other z-wave devices first, in order to establish the mesh you'll need for the lock to work reliably. When adding a device, it's best to attempt to "exclude" it first -- often that doesn't appear to do anything, but it helps to ensure the device isn't already added to some testing system they used at the factory, etc, etc. When you get two or three non-battery z-wave devices added (battery-powered devices don't act as repeaters, and therefore aren't really part of the mesh), then add the lock -- use the same process (attempt an exclude first, then an include), but make sure that the z-wave option to include *securely* is set (so that the lock and the ISY exchange security keys at time of inclusion, which is required for the lock to function with the ISY).

Oh yes, LED bulbs can indeed be noisy -- they have the same switching power supplies that other electronic devices have (and size of the device is NOT an indicator of the noise introduced, rather it's dependent on design, and usually correlates with quality...) I use the Philips Warm Glow LED bulbs, they are pretty well behaved. I've had mixed results with others. They also fail in odd ways -- my Insteon switch for the outdoor lights on either side of the garage door suddenly wouldn't turn off anymore -- went deaf, but only when it was turned on -- turned out that one of the 25-w LED bulbs had failed in such a way that while it still delivered all the light that it should, when it was on it generated enough noise to render the switch controlling it completely unusable. Switching to a better LED bulb fixed that.

Reasonably stable -- there's a handful of relatively minor bugs, and I suspect the real reason it's still not released is based on some features yet to be added, not based on lack of quality. Read the thread carefully, especially the part about your passwords being reset, and go for it.

Insteon as we knew it is dead. The new Smarthome, with new leadership, doesn't know who UDI is, what an ISY is, and they don't care either. The new MS (and any other Insteon device they might happen to release) won't ever have it's API released to UDI, because that's just not in the business plan for the new Smarthome. The above is not really my opinion -- I know that there are those who vehemently disagree (they'll be posting shortly on this thread) -- but I think putting the above on a post-it note on your computer monitor is wise, just so you can make absolutely certain that you really want to do this when you click "Buy Now" on that order for more Insteon MS devices... (My real opinion FWIW: the new Smarthome is still thoroughly confused by what they bought when they acquired Insteon, the PLM, and all the users that come along with it -- somebody thought they were just getting into the way cool, awesome IoT market, and discovered that there's more too it than little boxes and cloud servers, and that it's those little details like capacitors and noise and FCC approvals and UL certification and, etc, etc. that matter. So, not really a matter of kicking UDI and all of us to the curb as unwanted customers, but in the end, the effect is the same -- make sure, absolutely sure, you really want to invest further, especially with devices that aren't supported now, and may never be... (and I'd love to be proven wrong on that point, let's see if 2018 will bring an API document to UDI...)

Time lag, excessive Insteon traffic, and general uncertainty (is the door open, or closed, or should you wait a few more minutes and check again -- and if you can't rely on it, why automate it in the first place???)

No, the "10110" icon indicates that the ISY has queued up updates (such as a parameter change or a link-table update) for the device, but for some reason or other, it has not yet been able to do the update of the device. This is often associated with "link mode", but the ISY does not require a device to be in linking mode for the update -- it's just that when in link mode, a battery-powered device stays awake, making this update easier to perform.

And, if you think about this carefully, this seems almost tailor-made for malware... if you can somehow sneak a simple trojan into someone's home, it needs only the most rudimentary code to exercise this same uPnP code to ask your router to open up a port for some hacker to use, and then take the IP address so graciously offered by the router after it flings the doors wide-open, so-to-speak, and present that IP like the keys to the castle gates to said hacker for his/her enjoyment. For that reason, you should ALWAYS disable uPnP on your router!

If you are using the portal, there's nothing at all that needs to know your public IP address -- the ISY makes an *outbound* connection to UDI's portal servers, which obviates any need for anything to know your public IP.

There's another thread here where I've described my solution in detail -- the syncrolinc failed miserably because it's fused, and caused a failure. In a nutshell, what you want is to search eBay or Amazon for a "current-operated switch" -- these are squarish plastic-encased devices with a hollow center through which you run an insulated conductor (either the hot or the neutral, doesn't usually matter) for the line you wish to monitor. It has a couple of screw terminals on the top, which are connected to an internal solid-state switch that turns on or off (depending on model) when the current exceeds a preset threshold, usually adjustable via a screw and set of jumpers. Connect those screw terminals in the correct fashion to an IOLinc, and you have a far better solution for current sensing than the Syncrolinc ever was.

People seem to think in terms of "things" -- and as long as the conditions and actions associated with "things" are relatively simple, the "thing" approach offered by the ISY's programming language works just fine. If you have non-simple things -- lots of other conditions, or where the "then" or "else" clause has waits embedded in them, etc, then you quickly find that ISY's programming language just makes your head explode. In those cases, programming in terms of "events" is almost always easier, and almost always results in fewer "surprises" (aka bugs). At least in my experience -- I suspect this varies based on how one learned logic and coding, and may even vary depending on how individual brains are wired...

Been tinkering off and on with the 3D printer to see if I can make a replacement for the KPL buttons (which has worked pretty well). I can see if I can dig up the STL files for those, if you're interested. The issue is the finish on the face of the button -- it'll need to be filled, sanded smooth, and painted or laquered in all likelihood. (I've also been working (again, off and on) with making a replacement for the entire KPL faceplate -- with custom-sized buttons. The external geometry is done, and works great - now I need to work on the buttons themselves and how they link to the frame geometry. That project isn't ready yet, I'm afraid...) (Edited: found the source code for the KPL button generator -- and attached it. It's written in SCAD, so very easy to edit to tweak for your printer and filament characteristics. By default it generates three individual buttons (aka "chicklets") -- one double-wide standard, one small standard, and one double-wide that straddles two small buttons (i.e. a double-wide button that covers the "C" and "D" buttons on a KPL). If you prefer not to mess with SCAD, I've attached the default generated STL, which works great for me on a Lulzbot Mini, with ABS filament.) KPL_chicklet._new.scad KPL_chicklets.stl

Yep. I've replaced a couple with this issue -- one switchlinc that wasn't too painful, as it truly was ancient, but I also had a bad KPL and that hurt (much more $$ + it was just out of warranty period...)

You'll get lots of divergent opinions. I'll start: avoid Insteon, even if it means compromising on the multi-button devices. In a nutshell, at this point in time there's been no public announcements of direction from the new owners of the company, and based on the past year's product announcements, as well as announcements at CES there's simply no evidence of any new products or any new product development -- something sorely needed since Insteon's technology (as well as the protocol, both on the power line and over-the-air) is lagging far, far behind the others in this field.

A thing of beauty it is not... but immensely practical. And a lot safer than a tangle of wires on a workbench, waiting for a short circuit to happen!

Load sense. Various Insteon modules will send a very small trickle of current downstream after the relay, so that they can sense when the load is turned on or off (or plugged in or out, in the case of xmas lights). This allows them to turn on when a user (for example) turns on the floor lamp with its switch - a nice feature. It can then send a signal to other nodes in a scene informing them as well -- another really nice feature. Alas, to make this work, it is necessary to run that trickle of power. And it turns out that up to a few years ago nobody would ever notice that, and then we all installed those highly-efficient low-current-draw LEDs, and suddenly that teeny trickle of power is enough to make the lights actually stay on! There's no setting to change - you can turn off the load control feature in the settings menu, but that just changes the logic - it does not (and cannot) remove that trickle of power you're seeing. Sorry.

If you are wondering if its possible for a new Insteon device to be designed so that it doesn't need to be manually awakened, the answer is "Yes" -- newer Z-Wave devices do this with a feature called "beaming" (a very poor name, as it implies the wrong thing, but be that as it may). However devices need to be designed to work with this sort of technology, both the sending (powered) device and the sleeping (battery) device. For current Insteon products, there is a way to run a program when the device triggers, and force any updates to be applied. I'm not sure, however, that this technique will work for the heartbeat, or if it requires the actual triggering of the device (which would be a lot harder to do for a leak sensor than a door sensor, for example). And, of course, this will only work if the device is still linked correctly to the PLM -- so things like PLM replacements will never work with this. I've used this technique with an Insteon motion sensor, so my experience is limited -- perhaps someone knows if this works with the heartbeat from devices like leak sensors, etc.

It's not just a matter of supplying DC power -- the Insteon devices also require access to the AC signal as well in order to receive/inject the power-line communications signal, and for the RF side to coordinate its transmission. So, power-supply repair is required; replacement with an external source is not a solution.