ranman57

I just ran across this thread while looking for some other info, and the "almost burned my house down" sort of caught my eye for obvious reasons. I don't want to get real involved here, and don't know if any one is still following this anyway, but if the OP is familiar with programming his own AMX system then he can make his Insteon/ISY 994 do all sorts of fun and useful stuff it can't do on its own. I have a Crestron system running my house, using an ISY controller as the bridge from the Crestron system to the Insteon lighting. The implementation is actually fairly easy, just setting up a UDP connection to the ISY on pretty much any port you want and sending simple ASCIII serial commands out to the ISY. If you want true two way communication between the two systems you'll need to install the networking module, which can then talk back to the AMX system and allow you to query the ISY for any status info you want. A full disclaimer here is that I make my living programming Crestron systems, so my version of simple might be different than the OP's, but all the info you need to do it is available on this forum. My original reason for joining was to dig out that info and then making all the crazy stuff in my house work as a team, and it's all working pretty well at this point. The alarm system talks to the Crestron system for motion detection throughout the house, then the Crestron system knows what rooms are occupied and can act to turn off empty rooms after a given amount of time. It also will give you a verbal warning in the room 30 seconds before it turns everything off, so if you happen to have not moved for a while it doesn't leave you in the dark. When it gives you the warning you just wave your arm around until it tells you the off command has been cancelled. Yeah, it's way overkill but certainly a lot of fun. And it freaks people out when the house talks, which is an amusing side benefit. I guess my point here is if you have all this automated gear in the house integration is the key, and you can probably overcome any deficiencies in any one system by programming around it somewhere else. Just my .02...

This is my first post here on the forum, so please bear with me. I happened across this thread while looking for info on scripting options for my ISY 944, and how to get it to talk to my Crestron system. I program Crestron systems for a living, but certainly can't afford all the light switches it would take to run my house, so have been using Insteon stuff instead. Though with all the switches, keypads and serial interfaces I've replaced over the last few years I might have been better off just buying Crestron stuff. Oh well. I've had basic Insteon control working with Crestron for years, but recently decided to upgrade the level of control and feedback, hence my prowling the forum for info. All great stuff, and it's making the house all the more amusing to live in, unless you ask my live-in other half, who always asks why we can't have a normal house. That sort of leads into something I saw here, about people buying a house with an existing Creston system and hating it. Having worked on MANY homes where there was an existing Crestron system, and having the new owner hate it, that actually makes sense in a perverted sort of way. It sounds like a cool thing when you buy the house. But then you find out when you want to replace a TV you have to pay someone a lot of money to reprogram the system just to swap out a TV, well, you get disillusioned with a quickness. And then you find out the previous owner either never got the source code, or lost it, or whatever, and to replace a TV you have to rewrite all the code in the house from scratch at a truly terrifying cost, well at that point the hate is very understandable. But I think any home with pretty much any advanced level of automation in it has been very personalized for the owner who automated it, and the next guy who inhabits the place will probably find it frustrating, unless that person has a level of techiness in line with what the house has in it, and can appreciate the fun of adapting it to their wants and needs. But man, if you can't do it yourself you are in a world of trouble and cost very quickly, and you either need to rip it all out (not an option in most of the houses I work in. No automation = no lights, HVAC, security system etc.) or hire a reputable company to work with and make it happen correctly. Again, not an inexpensive proposition... But as far as reliabilty goes, Crestron IS the gold standard. The stuff is incredibly expensive, and very much not a DIY proposition. The level of control, and the amount of devices and systems Crestron can interface with is truly awesome. If a system has any sort of a reliable and understandable API , and can communicate reliably via pretty much any sort of communications bus we can make it dance. The reliability is mostly determined by the quality of the programming, much more so that the actual hardware. I routinely see code that I know never worked quite right. Or just wasn't really thought out well, even if it works. An interesting thing I've found over the years is that guys want all this crazy stuff, but the wife just wants to watch TV or turn on a light without having to jump through hoops. I just worked on a home where the wife truly hated the system, and wanted to rip it all out. The husband and a sales guy designed it, but she actually used it on a daily basis. So I sat down with her for a while, found out what was pissing her off, did a bunch of tweaking and now she loves the system. Human engineering is just as important, if not more so, than code and black boxes. I think it's also worth noting that homes with real mac daddy control systems of any ilk tend to have a lot of gadgets and systems that the system is controlling, and when one of those devices goes whacky the control system gets blamed for the failure. But trying to expain that the firmware upgrade Directv or someone like that pushed out, and which creamed the carefully planned control system running it, is one of my lifes most aggravating chores. But it happens often, and just comes with the territory. It's a very rare moment in time where all the tech in an advanced house is actually working, it's more of a game of whack-a-mole. You just replaced a bogus keypad, it's all good, and then the music server's hard drive bites it the next day. So it's obviously something that happened when the light switch was replaced, and "Damn it, this system never works!" is the next phone call. Big sigh... Just my 2 cents...