arskiracer

Yeah, I have that question too. What does Polisy do exactly? I know it provides access to a bunch of new stuff I don't have, like Ring, Tesla, Rachio. Does it also offer an alternative way to connect to Insteon devices other than the 2413S? I do have an Ecobee, not sure i need to automate anything off that though.

I tried swapping the serial board from my 2413S into a 2413U I had laying around and it didn't work. I think it was Brian who said the main boards have different SW versions between the serial and USB interfaces and they apparently aren't compatible. It's usually easier SW management in production to have the firmware recognize the hardware and automatically adapt, but often the firmware engineers are limited in code space or project schedule time to make that happen, so maybe that's why this apparently doesn't work.

You can also try www.octopart.com if you ever need hard to find parts. It's a search engine for electronic components and the results will include standard distributors like mouser, digikey, RS Components, Arrow. But it also includes brokers, which are more expensive and sometimes require custom quotes and minimum order quantities.

I'm in a similar boat. My home automation system is down without a PLM. I'm not yet willing to pay 3X the price for an eBay PLM, so I'm just waiting until they come back in stock. The built-in insteon links at least keep my switches and lights working. I design boards at my work, and I've had similar issues there. I've been redesigning boards with parts that are available, but maybe their engineering team doesn't have that luxury. The other option is for them to buy from brokers at double or more the cost of components, but they might not have enough margin for that.

@Brian H, how do you know what changed in different revisions of the 2413S? Is that by visual inspection of different rev boards, or do you have a series of schematic revisions you reference?

Also, any reprocessed medical device sold in the US still has to be approved by the FDA to be both safe and effective. I think it would be difficult to go after a hospital for using refurbished equipment when the federal government has already put their stamp of approval on it.

My argument is that the existence of a reference design is Insteon's permission to use the reference design at other development companies, because that's how it always works. If it didn't there would be legal language about not re-selling, etc, (as is often the case with publicly available software). Firmware is different than hardware and often requires a per-device license to resell, if the company even wants to provide the firmware at all, often they don't. But a hardware reference design is always based on the chips that they're wanting to sell, because the reference is useless without those foundational chips, so anyone using the reference design is automatically using the chips the parent company is wanting to sell.

UDI could, but I imagine they don't have a desire to make an identical product to one already on the market. Companies often look for new market share for high yield returns. It's often thought to be more profitable to enter a new area, rather than trying to overtake existing products with a competing product that has no new features. I'm no lawyer, but I know if I created a schematic, then posted it online for others to use in their own designs, it would be perfectly legal for them to use it in their own designs. As I said earlier, this is very common, because companies that sell ICs want to make it as easy as possible for engineers to integrate those ICs into their own products, so the company who created the reference design can sell more of those ICs to the downstream company, which then sells their product to the end user. I didn't know Insteon made their own ICs, but that appears to be the case, according to their reference design. They even gave it a model number starting with IN (probably for INsteon). In 2007, Insteon created a reference design for engineers to use in order to integrate Insteon powerline and RF ICs into their products. The reference schematic appears to include the 2007 version of the 2413 main board and the serial and USB interface boards. At the time, they mentioned that they were working on an IC that integrated both the RF and powerline functions into a single IC, but that wasn't complete yet. Their goal for making these reference schematics public is likely the same goal of most companies who have public reference designs, which is to sell ICs to companies who want to use them in their designs. This is very common, you would know this if you were an electrical design engineer in new product development. My designs probably use 50% or more reference designs in them, because it reduces the design time and reduces the mistakes in the first prototypes. Reprocessing is also very legal. It is big in medical devices where single use products will be refurbished and sterilized for additional uses, then sold at a discounted price by a 3rd party. Although the manufacturers don't like this, it is legal, and companies integrate crypto chips into electronic products to help reduce the ease of reprocessing. Although this happens in the US, it's more prevalent in other countries, but not for legal reasons, but because US healthcare has a lot of money and generally targets quality over price.

Have you found a patent on the assembly level 2413S module specifically? If they provide a reference design, they intend people to use their chips to build products out of them. This is a very common practice. I've used many reference designs in my career, because it reduces design time and reduces the chance of mistakes. It also helps to understand which pins are supposed to be connected to what, when the data sheet is unclear. Companies guard their schematics very closely and they rarely make it to the public unless the company chooses to make a reference design out of them, which then means they are wanting engineers to use their design as a reference when designing their own products with the chips they supply. Almost all IC manufacturers have reference designs for their components. Sometimes the component manufacturers will also provide complete designs to end-users, and still provide reference schematics for other companies to design their chips into competing products, as appears to be the case here with Insteon. Other companies that do this include Spark Fun and Arduino. Adafruit even makes their own versions of some of the simple Arduino boards that are nearly identical to the Arduino reference designs, with slight changes to adapt the original reference to Adafruit's purpose, and Arduino doesn't care, because they provided the reference designs for that exact purpose. *edited to correct model number reference.

Being that Insteon provided a reference design for the two IN268xx chips, they are wanting people to design their own Insteon devices, probably including a PLM, because Insteon would be supplying the chips. I was considering designing one myself, but I'm a hardware engineer, and although I could probably do the firmware, it is a little more challenging for me and would take a long time. Plus if I were to go through that much work, I would want to sell it to make some money for my time, but I would then have to go through FCC testing and certification and I don't know if I want to put in that much effort.

Anyone know of updated reference design schematics for the 2413S boards? I found this old 2007 design guide for using IN2680A (power line) and IN2682A (RF) modules, complete with reference design schematics and BOMs. My 2413S V2.4 went out, and replacements are impossible to find right now. I was considering debugging it with these schematics, but I assume the reference designs are out of date with V2.4, being the schematics are from 2007 (assuming the actual product even uses the reference design schematics for their chips, but it seems like they probably do, since there are pictures of the actual enclosure). http://cache.insteon.com/pdf/INSTEON_Modem_Developer's_Guide_20071012a.pdf There is also mention that they were working on a combined powerline/RF chip, did that ever happen? I also can't seem to find the IN26xxx ICs on Octopart, so I'm guessing they were either obsoleted by a combined chip, or they are only sourced by Insteon directly.

Okay, makes sense. Yeah, a Not() would be great here. A separate program will get me by though. I'll know tomorrow if the way I set it up works. Thanks for the help.

So I programmed this up, and now that it's October, it is keeping the lights off for the entire month, instead of just on the 31st. I'm not sure what I did wrong, seems to be the nested AND should make it respond to month and day both. What am I doing wrong?

That would work too, but personally I don't like to create programs I know are going to stop working at some point, when I could spend slightly more time and have them be more robust. Especially because I like to set up my stuff and forget it for many years. That's the main reason I went with the isy, because the reliability is amazing and I don't have to ever mess with it. It just works, unlike my Asus router, which I have to reboot on a monthly basis, and am therefore going to replace it with a much more expensive setup from Ubiquiti, all because I want to set it and forget it. It wasn't so bad before I had kids, but now it's tough to find 15 minutes to configure anything without kids climbing all over me and pushing buttons on my keyboard. That's why it took me 2 months from when I posted this question to finally implement the 10 minute solution.

I got it working by just setting a variable for month and another for day, then in my program that turns front lights on at sunset, i just have it not run if both of those variables are 10 and 31. What I was missing previously was the little play button that changes the things you can set variables to. Didn't know about that. And I just figure if I'm home, I'll turn on the lights when I'm ready for trick-or-treaters, which will likely be before sunset anyway. I just don't like when I'm away trick-or-treating with my own kids and realize my front lights came on an hour ago and people are probably lining up at my house. Thanks everyone!