mwester

The results observed by 502ss are not an isolated case -- I too used burn time back when I was monitoring an ancient oil-burning furnace. I didn't set out to monitor oil levels -- my goal was simply to ensure that the furnace was working when I wasn't there at the old farmhouse, so I was monitoring the thermostat 24VAC line to detect when it was calling for heat, and monitor the temperature adjacent to the boiler to ensure it actually fired up. As a side effect of the monitoring, I discovered that it was dead simple to compute run-time, and from that I tried to estimate fuel level left in the tank - and to my surprise, the estimates were amazingly close. I did that for two years, and never once was off by more than 10 gallons from the gauge.

Z-Wave works well -- and unlike the zigbee, the ISY z-wave module DOES support home automation devices.

I think the statement on the bottom of that blue object in the background is significant: CAUTION! From the components visible on the circuit board, I would not recommend connecting any part of that circuit to an IOLinc, or even exending any circuit inside that device to the outside via a wire of any sort. Particularly if you, as you state several times, are not completely sure about what you're doing. The risk is that you will inadvertently bring the live house power (at 120 Volts) out of the device on that wire. Sure, you're measuring only 3 Volts across the speaker -- but that might very well be 117 Volts on one terminal and 120 Volts on the other -- the difference is 3 volts. You might even be able to get it to work with an IOLinc without any sparks or smoke -- but if you have that sort of voltage on one of the wires going to the IOLinc from that device, and your cat or dog happens to touch it, or chew it, well, that would be bad. Or if something sparks, and the spark falls onto your wooden floor, or your wooden baseboard, or your flammable carpet or rug... And even if you measure carefully to ground -- well, reversing the plug on the device might change everything. Don't do it.

Gah! I'm suprised it lasted that long! An air conditioner - that's about the worst possible load you can put on a relay; I can't think of any worse household appliance. The startup current is simply off-the-scale with those compressor motors. That 11.5 A rating -- that's "running". The starting current for that sucker is probably 20+ amps, but even worse, if the A/C unit is "on" when the tiny itty-bitty little relay in the outletlinc turns "off", there's going to be a massive arc inside that little relay. They make special relays for A/C units -- google "definite purpose contactor" to get an idea of what they look like (there's NO way that'll fit inside an outlet); the little relays in your outletlinc aren't in that league by any means. So, nothing wrong with the outletlinc, just the wrong application for it.

It's a edge view of a pcb -- I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing there?

I do. I won't be renewing it, though...

Not here. The amazon drones can only take it so far, when they run out of power, they drop the package and it travels the rest of the way to my door by barge, horse-and-buggy, and the last little bit by foot. Even FedEx "Priority One Overnight Guaranteed by 10AM" took two days. On the other hand, USPS regularly gets me my eBay purchases in two days and sometimes less... go figure.

Not necessarily... When I lived in one of the Chicago suburbs (conduit required by code), I had to pull some extra conductors through various parts of the house, and in order to ensure that I didn't confuse myself I chose colors that weren't already used anywhere in the house -- orange, yellow, and light blue. Because I had to wire the basement for a rec room and a workshop later on, I saved money by buying 500' spools of the orange and yellow -- the point being that the basement got wired with white, orange, and yellow wiring, all completely legit, per code (it was inspected and passed), and not at all "control cable". Also, using the conduit as ground was completely acceptable in Chicago and surrounding counties. I did pull one run to my home office for the computer equipment with a ground wire and it's own outlet -- if I recall correctly, one uses a specially marked and colored outlet to signify such a dedicated run. Regarding the original post, I think code demands a switch at each entrance to an attached garage. So removing the switch by that door, unless the door is permanently sealed and completely inoperable (not just "unused, it has to be sealed in some way), it may be a code violation to remove that switch. Just sayin.

Nope, factory-resetting the unit has no effect on anything else in the Insteon network; only that device itself will be erased. Now, other devices may still have links referencing that reset unit, and certain software or functions may not work the way they should because the PLM erased it's links - but even that's quite fixable. Just don't plug it into ISY B to test it - that could be bad.

Yep, exactly. Seems really odd, but that's actually pretty common when dealing with z-wave and network resources, or basically with any devices that are not Insteon-based. With a pure Insteon-based implementation, the scene and the button behavior usually "just work" because of the way one usually constructs scenes; when I added z-wave I ended up creating a bucket-load of scenes that exist for no other purpose than to control the LEDs on my keypads. Naming conventions are useful to keep those scenes separate from any Insteon scenes that have controllers driving them.

Add button d as a responder to a scene. Then, in your programs that do the hue work, just set that scene to "on" or "off" in order to cause that LED on the keypad to illuminate or not.

Nope, you're right -- the 2413S does not supply power (unlike the 2412S, which did).

Well, you're on the right general sort of direction, in the sense that there is an alternate way to gain access to the ISY -- but it isn't through the PLM. Your ISY should have a micro-B USB port on it -- plug a usb cable in, and plug the other end into your computer. Now, what you do once you get that done I can't tell you.. I've been meaning to try it, but the problem is that the ISY just keeps working so I've never had any incentive to do so. But I think there are other threads here on this forum where users have done that and recovered the ISY, so perhaps a search would help. Otherwise, someone will be along (perhaps even the UDI folks) and offer some assistance rather soon, I expect.

but only in white...

I do love those buttons - very, very nice. I'm going to hold off on an engraver, though. The fundamental problem that I see, at least for me, is not the engraver -- it's that the person using it needs to have some skill and artistic ability to create a nice, clear, clean, meaningful icon for the button face in the first place! And since style is not my strong point (heck, I consider it a good day when I successfully match my socks!), I'll have to wait until we get some sort of "button graphic library" created. Again, nice job on the buttons, Marcin!

I agree with you, EddieRock - up to a point. I guess my concern with opening that up in general is the potential for abuse - it would make Alexa just intolerable if a random skill that I've enabled suddenly made Alexa shout political slogans during the dinner hour in order to push the agenda of the developer... I think Amazon needs to figure out a mechanism, somewhat "android-app-like", where I approve the features such as the ability for something to make Alexa speak. The fundamental difference is that right now, a skill does not actually get access to anything from my Echo until the skill is addressed by me invoking the skill FROM MY ECHO (emphasis). What you're asking for troubles me because it opens up a means for some other thing, be it connected home, or some third-party skill that I (or my kids) have enabled, to cause the Echo to initiate something WITHOUT the echo itself being involved. From a security point-of-view, that means the attack-surface of the Echo has just dramatically increased. So, I'm willing to wait to see what Amazon does. And, if they do the wrong thing, I'm also willing to put my echo and tap up for sale on eBay.

I tried swapping the daughterboard, and the PLM didn't start up correctly - but perhaps there was another problem. Regarding the Subcategory ID -- it turns out the the ISY (5.0.2) doesn't care. While waiting for my 2413S to ship, I pressed my USB PLM into service using a Raspberry Pi as a serial-to-USB bridge. It's working fine (although it's not robust enough to be a permanent solution by any means!).

Alas, no you cannot just swap the daughterboards -- different firmware on the base board.

Congrats to the creator of this. However, I think I can do pretty much the same with an angle bracket from the hardware store, a bit of black paint, and a black wire tie... for less than 2 dollars! (and it wouldn't even look to much different!)

Nice. The Dot just replaced the Echo in the kitchen. Looks nicer there (less obtrusive), and now the Echo can go to my office, where it was always supposed to go (I made the error of setting it up in the kitchen, and once we started using it there, well, it just wasn't going to leave...) The spoken audio quality of the Dot is noticeably less than the Echo - not objectionable, but I guess we just got spoiled by the better speakers in the bigger unit. The appearance, however, is far nicer - the Dot doesn't "vanish" on a table by any means, but it's not at all "in your face" like the Echo tended to be.

Basically, the API between a node server and the ISY is limited to integer data, and pre-defined text values such as "0 = off", "1 = on". Thus one cannot provide the user with any of the identifying information about a Sonos Zone, because one (the name) is an arbitrary text string that cannot be pre-defined in the node server app (I can't possibly know your room names!), and the other (the id) is a hexadecimal string which cannot be represented as a simple integer. The result is that one would need to create a separate, out-board web-based "configuration" tool that could provide that user-defined mapping as part of a setup or configuration exercise. And from a practical point of view, if you're going to write that, then it just doesn't make much sense to write an entire node server -- a few network resources as we can do today are dead simple by comparison.

@barrygordon - no, Sonos does not do bluetooth control. It uses a very complex SOAP-based API for communications and control. @bsnively - I think you'll find that what you're proposing is rather easily done, and I suspect others are doing it now. Search the threads for Sonos. In a nutshell, you'll need to create network resources to control your various Sonos devices - on resource per action (so if you want, for example, on and off, select playlist a, b, c and d, for each of 3 rooms, that's (2 + 4) * 3 total resources... it gets painful to keep editing all those, but it works. Then create programs to do the work, and assign the programs as "spoken" in the portal. Remember that "Alexa tell izzy to turn Kitchen Sonos on" runs the "then" part of the program, and the "off" command runs the "else" -- so tie the appropriate network resources into the appropriate parts of the programs. Done. Enjoy! (Now, if you're looking for something a lot easier to set up on the backend -- there are folks working on that, but it ain't easy. I'm stalled on my project right now (a node server integration of the Sonos) because without a richer set of controls in the ISY screens, you just can't create a node status that makes sense -- I can show you that Sonos 7 is playing source 43, but you probably prefer to know that Sonos "Master Suite" is playing "Classical Rock Redux" instead!). (And, if you're looking for something on the front end, where you can tell Alexa to "play Classical Rock Redux in the Master Suite", well, that's something that a lot of Sonos users would like to see, but IMO are unlikely to ever get -- the amazon folks want music playback to happen from Alexa, not Sonos, where the data is streamed from their data center servers instead of your choice... and since they own Alexa, the echo hardware, they're not likely to give that up!)

I suspect we're on the bleeding edge of automation - like the early days of any new technology, everyone wants an exclusive lock-in on it. I'm going to be optimistic and state that my crystal ball indicates a high probability of a standardized HA interface for devices such as these -- on the low end, perhaps just dry contacts on a few key items, on the high end perhaps a serial port of some sort. Your HA "z-wave interface box" or "Insteon interface box" or "cell phone NFC interface box" would just plug in, and of course hobbyists could create their own interfaces. The reason I think this is that once this sort of instrumentation becomes a common consumer expectation, most of the appliance manufacturers will realize that there's no margin in creating their own custom interface. Many will start by OEM'ing and re-branding common "black boxes" provided by other companies, and end up not wanting to even do tech support for those, hence they'll just provide a connector -- and you go to Best Buy or Walmart and pick up your favorite brand of appliance interface box. Now, anyone wanna bet if Insteon will end up in that race, or if they'll have fallen on their faces in the mud by then??!

I too thought I'd invested way too much effort with HouseLinc and my devices to start all over again with the ISY. I was wrong. It proved to be a nightmare in terms of management to try to preserve the links. After pulling out my hair (something I can ill-afford since I have so little left), I gave up -- factory-reset all devices, the PLM, the ISY, and started afresh. It was the best choice I could have made, and proved to be far less work in the long run. I'd advise you to do the same - reset everything, start fresh with the ISY, and use it for all link management. Much easier. Heck, I'm betting the effort you invested thus far as documented in this thread is more than you would have spent if you reset and started over to begin with!

I blame you all for my OCD on wall plate screws. Until someone on this forum mentioned, I didn't used to care... now all of them are properly vertical, and there's a little screwdriver in the kitchen junk drawer just in case I come across one that isn't "just right"...