kohai

I think the next day they reversed their decision due to backlash: http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/16/philips-hue-reverses-decision-to-block-third-party-light-bulbs/ I wouldn't be surprised to see them try a different angle at it down the road.

Thanks for this. I've read through the polyglot stuff and it was pretty technical -- this is easier to understand.

Interesting, I guess that makes sense... kind of like a WHILE but different.

This concept of the IF being evaluated again during the processing of the THEN seems so weird to me. I don't think I've run into a programming language that does that because often in the THEN statement you modify variables that make the IF no longer true (like a counter).

What do you guys use the data for? Is it triggering something?

I think there is a steep learning curve with home automation. Often instructions are written for people that are familiar with it and that is frustrating to us newbies. I used to do a lot of system administration and was always very annoyed when I ran into a problem and the error message said "Please contact your system administrator." That was me and I didn't know the answer! I'm trying to get my Centralite lighting system setup to talk to my ISY and the instructions are definitely written for someone that already has experience with the system (RS232 serial connection, yep). I've just discovered that when the previous home owner finished the basement, they put a different Centralite system in the basement. Doh. Now my main floor is one system that is hard wired (Centralite Elegance) and the basement is another system based on Zigbee (Centralite Jetstream). I'm messing with z-wave so I think I'm going to end up needing to connect two lighting systems into my ISY. And, I end up with zigbee and z-wave in the same house which I read is doable. blah blah blah. That's a long way of saying things get complicated fast and I'm a newbie. I think I fall into the camp of wanting to automate things but not wanting to just do things on my phone that I can already do (e.g. I don't need to turn the lights on from my phone but I may want the entry light to turn on automatically when someone rings the doorbell). The more I play around with it, the more ideas I get on how to use it. I started out with just a couple "nice to have" things but my list is getting a bit longer. I started with a doorbell, water sensors, and freezer temperature. Now I'm finding other ideas that will be neat.

If you have a linux box or raspberry pi on your network you could use nmap to scan the network for anything with an open port 80 (web server). example (change your ip subnet to match your network) nmap -p 80 192.168.1.0/24 If you have a debian based linux you can install nmap via: sudo apt-get install nmap

I'm a newbie too in the last week or so. I think home automation is a pretty technical hobby. I looked at Smartthings and others and saw that all of the controllers were requiring programming to do what I want to do -- that isn't unique to ISY. To my newbie eyes reading the forums for competing controllers, it was clear that people are sharing their programs and ways to do things. I didn't see a flexible controller that was preprogrammed to do everything with little effort. I want flexibility and with that comes a bit of complexity. I see the ISY as an aggregator of tools/platforms. If you want to do Insteon you can do that. If you want to have a z-wave lock, then you can do that too with your ISY (at the same time you are doing Insteon). If something is reaching across the network (e.g. sonos), you can program that to do things. This past weekend I've been playing with python queuing my sonos to play a doorbell chime (and resume playing music as applicable). I've got it functioning and will share my script when I clean it up. For most sonos use, the sonos app on my phone is much more convenient. I only need to interact with it from the ISY when I want it to do something in an automated fashion.