mwester

I was told, indirectly, that my comments about bandwidth concerns were not welcome on this topic. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to comment -- has anyone checked just how much traffic there is in the Insteon event viewer over the course of a day? And all of those events are supposed to be sent, in real time, out my internet connection to the portal -- to be queued up to be delivered to some remote app that may not even be powered up? That costs money - to me, starting at my uplink. To UDI (and thus to me next time my portal subscription needs to be renewed) when they need more AWS machines to handle all this traffic. And so little of this, so very very little, is ever going to be delivered! Clearly the filtering (there has to be filtering) has to happen at the ISY.

Nope, the network module doesn't do anything for those. I looked at the API for those some time ago -- they contact an Amazon-owned service, which then calls to your AWS-hosted service to deal with the event. In other words, in addition to being dependent on Amazon's cloud-based service, the device would also be dependent upon your own cloud-based service -- which ultimately could contact the UDI portal, which could relay the event to your ISY. That's three separate cloud-bases services, all hosted in Amazon's cloud -- just for a button in my house to send a message to the ISY in my house. Yikes! Rube Goldberg would be proud of the state of IoT these days...

I'm imagining the possible snarkiness that might be evident whenever Alexa is asked to call upon Google for assistance...

Whatever you end up doing, please please make it "opt-in"!! I really do not want to have to compete with my ISY for outbound internet bandwidth! Now, I know its probably peanuts to all you in the big cities with your 100 Terabyte/Second fiber optic links to your houses, but many of us in the smaller towns have far, far slower links and suffer with the horrors of data limits on top of it. A constant stream, 24x7, of ISY events going to the portal will add up over a month.

Can you buy a google home yet? I read an article (from a not-so-reputable-looking site) that claimed google will have contractual language prohibiting any company who has created an Echo integration from participating in the google home ecosystem... I expect that from Apple, but not from da google.

Cloud Messaging? Is that like when airplanes write something overhead at special events? Seriously, anyone have any URLs to what these things are?

Safe mode usually means your PLM bit the dust. And the 2-year thing sort of confirms it -- SmartHome's PLMs die (due to poor component selection) right at the 2-year mark -- see the the PLM repair thread here for more info. At this point, you can try unplugging the PLM and ISY, then plug in the PLM, wait a few seconds, and power up the ISY. It might work for a few hours or days while you wait for a replacement PLM. Once you get your new PLM (good for another two years), make sure you follow the replacement procedures and do NOT do a DELETE PLM (or all is lost and you get to start from scratch!).

Nope - I've a few of these, along with a whole other variety of KPLs, and they all work pretty much the same in scenes. Perhaps if you can be a bit more clear about what "they don't work" means, it would help try to figure out what might be wrong. As for the one that shows the status of the garage door, isn't that exactly what it should be doing?

Doing nothing apparent to us on the outside. I guess there's a small chance they "get it" that power-line comms are getting more difficult and that their RF solution is crippled by coupling to the power-line. Perhaps they "get it" that the world needs at least some semblance of security on the RF and power-line messages. And perhaps because of that, they're busy redesigning all their products for some new magical 'v3" insteon comms mechanism, and once they bring that market, they'll be well positioned to release a bevy of new products to take on the creative z-wave stuff already on the market, and even surpass them all. And, perhaps my dogs will both sprout wings and learn to fly.

Me too -- I'd really prefer "Hey You!" as the wake word! Of course, that's politically-incorrect in today's day and age. I feel the preferred way might be: "Oh worthy one, I humbly beseech thee..."

Use the former method. The IOLinc is unlikely to be able to handle the current on the low-voltage side.

Sigh. I do appreciate the need to protect children who persist in trying to stick pointy metal things into outlets. So I do make a point to always have one or two commercial-grade TR outlets as spares in my electrical repair parts box. The problem is that the blasted things fail - the little leaves or shutters or whatever jam up and then you can't use the outlet for anything anymore. Grr. And then there are those arc-fault breakers... again, I appreciate the problem they solve, so I've been sure to have the installed even in a few rooms where code doesn't require it. But in this three-year-old house, I've already replaced one, and I've a second one that insists on leaving me in the dark for no reason at all randomly for the past couple days. Those things are EXPENSIVE! And that's just for the AFCI breaker -- I can't imagine what an electrician would cost to swap that out on top of that. My point -- until we figure out how to make this new "safety" stuff also reliable, people are going to reject it, and find ways to disable the malfunctioning safety bits or go back to the old tried-and-true "un-safe" devices. (We're really getting off topic here, and I'm contributing to that - sorry!)

I've heard about you Canadians and hydroponics... it's not lettuce that y'all grow up there, I know that!

Nobody can tell you if the RF connection will be adequate. That's a function of too many factors unique in your environment. IF your building has no other sources of RF, particularly around the 900 MHz band, and the fixtures into which you'll mount the Insteon dimmer units is not metal, and you have line-of-sight between each Insteon dimmer and the PLM, then it's reasonable to expect that it will work. However, all it takes is for some industrial machine operating in the 900MHz unlicensed range to power up, or for someone to take some other 900MHz device (baby monitor? Walkie-talkie? Who knows what?) and put it in exactly the wrong place (and nobody can tell you where that might be either), and suddenly you'll loose the connection. It's largely trial and error, so you'll just have to try it, find the issues, move things or add a few range extenders, etc, until ti works. I'm also a little concerned about the LED lighting power supplies -- they're undoubtedly switching supplies, which generate so much noise that they tend to render the Insteon power-line communications useless. That means that your mesh may have to rely entirely on RF, rather than the ideal case where the PLM need only have comms to one of the dimmers, and it would relay over the powerlines to the others. Or even worse (and again, you have to try it, nobody can tell if this will happen), if the noise at the zero-crossing point of the AC power is bad enough, Insteon devices cannot process the RF signal either -- so basically, if you have bad power, the RF may also become useless. Buy a couple units, make sure you can return them, and test the comms before you go any further with this project.

Or, of course, you could search around (eBay? "Coffee Shop" area of this forum?) to see if anyone has a KPL that has the same part number and about the same version as the failed one. Don't worry about the color; it's really easy to swap the entire faceplate with the buttons.

I left Ontario to attend college in the US -- a bunch of us had one of our new friends (from down south) convinced that when we went home for Christmas break, we would park at the border and rent a dog-sled for the rest of the trip... But the truth be told, as one of my roommates put it, there was no good way to distinguish the Canadians from the Americans at school, except to note that fact to a Canadian and observe the reaction.

I'm betting they noticed you're in Canada, and they're stuck trying to find a carrier that delivers by dog-sled.

Ok, back on topic -- Any details anywhere on how the Echo determines which is closest? Is it simply volume, or signal-to-noise ratio, or is it something more complex (such as quality of the voice matching or suchlike)? I ask because given the placement of my two devices, I'm not sure that volume will do the right thing, but understandability of the voice certainly will improve that (specifically, you lose the high-frequency components but not the volume when sound travels through a glass door...)

Sorry, I don't speak "Minion". Can you try again, in Java or Python?

With the rise of Internet "journalism" comes the precipitous plummeting of the quality of same.

Regrettably, new-in-the-box doesn't mean anything with regard to Insteon settings; it's commonly reported that new Insteon devices show up with all manner of odd (and in some cases impossible-to-reproduce) settings and devices configured. So the general advice is to factory-reset each device before initial setup. Based on what you've said, I doubt that this is your problem, but a factory reset and a restore of that device certainly wouldn't hurt. (FWIW, I'm in that group of users who've switched to more reliable controls for the GDO -- I use a z-wave door controller instead of the IOLinc.)

Alas, because the protocol Smart Home designed into the PLM doesn't permit doing that in any reliable manner. The ISY can request the links from the PLM, but the PLM will abort transmitting the list as soon as it has any other traffic. So on a large installation, where you'll have lots of links, and lots of devices that are reporting back and forth, it's pretty much impossible to get the full and correct list of PLM links back. This is a known issue, and its one thing when a human is looking at the results, but it completely kills any possibility of an automated "integrity" task. It sure would be nice, and not just to detect failing PLMs.

i agree completely -- consolidation is clearly being forced by the Echo. The fragmentation of the Home Automation marketplace has been a huge problem for everyone, and I'm really surprised that it's Amazon, and the Echo, that has proved to be such a catalyst to at least some form of high-level consolidation. And I'd have preferred that it didn't happen in the "cloud". But it's better than nothing. The fog in my crystal ball is clearing slightly -- the shadows imply that we'll see a consolidation for the smaller players, most likely in the form of a standard API layer that would sit between services like Amazon's Echo and the proprietary device/service. While the vendors would do this to reduce the cost of implementing, testing, and certifying with Amazon each time they make a change or introduce a device, we might benefit from such a (hypothetical) API if we could coerce the ISY or a node server into integrating with that (hypothetical) API. Of course, that would imply cooperation... and now the fog has filled my crystal ball completely again. Sigh.

Don't they allow Chrome to be installed on WIndows systems up there in Canada???

Below is a screenshot of a Hue bulb, as it appears in 5.0.2 using the current Polyglot/Hue node server. The ONLY other way to integrate Hue is via network resources. In other words: there is no software-only solution that does not require an outboard processor for the ISY -- basically because it is not possible to write software add-ons that run on the ISY itself. Thus the Polyglot solution - UDI adds a means to make it possible to "proxy" nodes to an outboard computer, and software developers and hobbyists can safely write all the code they want on that outboard computer without compromising the ISY itself. It's a beautiful thing. Now I understand from our earlier conversation on this that some folks don't want to have to set up an outboard computer. I get that. Hence my suggestion that somebody (UDI? mwester-devices-r-us.com?) package up the outboard computer, complete with cables and instructions to tell you to plug this there and that here, point your browser at this url, fill in these fields, and presto! Now you can download apps from the UDI Polyglot App Store. We're just not there yet.