fennertron

I have the Echo - more expensive, and has a nicer speaker. The 2nd gen Echo Dot is just as capable and has a small speaker good for voice feedback but less good for playing music. The Echo family has been around for a little over a year -- that's why there can be an All New version 2 of the Echo Dot, because there was a version 1 before Check out the Amazon page you probably used to pre-order the Dots:

Through the my.isy.io portal, you can configure the Alexa integration; there you specify the name of the device as Alexa knows it, and what device, scene or program it corresponds to on your isy994i. My family has gotten quite used to this, from just scenes to "Alexa, turn on movie" turns the TV on, dims the lights in the living room, turns out the lights in the surrounding rooms, etc. via a program. It's got its limitations; Alexa sometimes gets confused because there is a Nest thermostat named "Living Room" and it can't tell whether I mean the living room lights or thermostat (but that's an Alexa problem, not an isy problem). I have some variables that I'd love to have Alexa set directly, but that's not supported. So, if you're happy: a) controlling lights, scenes and programs with "Alexa, turn ___ (on/off/brighter/dimmer)" explicitly linking each light/scene/program with a word for Alexa to use I bet you'll be pleased. I ordered the dot 6 pack myself. Bill

Ah, fascinating. So I could end up with my own box under the bed, with three plugs: one for power, and one from each of the two bed-controlled outlets to the sense wires; and then, two outlets of my own, the outputs of the micro module. That's a fascinating idea, and the simplest for sure. Simple is good. I'll need to use polarized plugs for the sense wire, since we need to sense the hot and ignore the neutral. If I plug the power supply into an always-on outlet in the bed-control box, then I won't have to worry about any possible phase issues between my hot and the sensed hot - it'll be the same hot. If I cap off the neutral on these lines, I won't have to worry about a short circuit due to reversing polarity; it just won't detect. I'll talk with my electrician friend before building this box, but I do like the idea.

I looked at the SynchroLinc when I was doing my research for this. Its job is to sense the power status of the thing that is plugged into it, and send that state as Insteon commands - from that web page, It's like your "local control" light, sensing whether or not current is flowing through it to the light, but without any control itself. Since the current cuts off at the *outlet* on the bed controller box, the SynchroLinc wouldn't have a chance to send any "Off" command. And every time I turn the remote on, the SynchroLinc would think that it was recovering from a power outage. Imagine my situation as an outlet controlled by a wall switch, in which you can't change either the outlet or the switch, but I want to sense the state of the switch by plugging something into the outlet.

Not quite - there's a big box under the bed that controls motors, etc. and there are outlets on the side of this box for each bedside lamp. They're simple relays, you can hear a quiet click. But there's only one power plug for the whole system. This is actually my biggest goal: as you walk into the room, turn on the bedside lamps via Insteon. Thanks for the other ideas. I have a ton of stuff on my plate right now - we have new outdoor heaters controlled with 0-10VDC and I'm trying to write some fancy programs with a keylinc-8 to provide a UI...

I have a sleep number bed, and part of the remote is control of bedside lamps. I would rather move these to Insteon control, while keeping the control via the sleep number remotes also. My idea is to be able to say "is this outlet on", and let that signal control a scene (or a program) that controls the Insteon lights. The only real idea I've had so far is to have a little power supply plugged into each controlled outlet, that turns on a relay, that can be sensed by an iolinc. The other idea is to use something like the Smartenit EZIO2x4, and send the output of the power supply (maybe a little USB brick) directly to the inputs. Has anyone done something like this, and/or does anyone have any ideas that I haven't considered, or tradeoffs of the two solutions? Thanks, Bill