upstatemike

Y2K20 bug!

Was hoping to get my Polisys before the end of the decade but it doesn't look like that is going to happen. I guess there is always next year.

Getting close now!

Very happy to see the new PLM specs... wonder how long till it is available? I would also like to see them resume custom etched labels for keypad buttons.

I wonder if a Lutron Pico wall bracket could also be used as backing for an Insteon RemoteLink2 ? Just holding the pieces in my hand suggest it could be made to work

Install a Lutron Caseta switch which can handle a good range of lighting types without a neutral wire. Use Polyglot to control it from your Insteon environment. If you take the micro dimmer approach then you can change the wiring at the fixture so the load wire is instead a neutral wire to the switch box. You can then use any Insteon switch or keypad to control the micro dimmer in the fixture. If you don't want to mess with the wiring then cap off the wires in the switch box and use a remotelinc2 mounted in the switch bracket to control the micro dimmer.

I will probably try some as well so I can turn off the built-in IR on my cameras because it attracts spiders like crazy. Just have to prioritize them on a very long list of HA toys that I want to play with.

Not yet. My spotlights and floodlights are still just standard LED bulbs. I only used Lifx bulbs in lamp posts, porch fixtures, and outside wall sconces.

Regarding Hue another factor for me is retrofit applications. It is typical in 100+ year old houses to have rooms with no light switches; only sconces and ceiling fixtures with pull chains. Easiest way to add a light switch is stick a Hue switch on the wall and put the cheaper white Hue bulbs in the ceiling, walls, and lamps (figure 5 bulbs per room typically, maybe 10 in a master bedroom or other large room). Even without introducing color effects you burn through the available bridge capacity pretty fast with Hue.

I sort of agree. 1 bulb is cool. 6 bulbs is no longer a novelty. An entire room, or floor, or outside landscape is wow!

It is just a matter of taste. You can't set much of a dramatic scene with a single lamp with a single color bulb. To do it right you need to include all the lights in the room and having the granularity in a chandelier to change the hue of each exposed bulb can greatly enhance the effect. Why have home automation as a hobby if you're not going to have some fun with it?

Recent Hue firmware has fixed the issue of returning to full brightness after a power glitch but I can't get past the 50 bulb limit on the bridge. My front Hall chandelier uses ten bulbs just for that one fixture so at that rate Hue isn't going to get you very far. You can use multiple bridges but Alexa only supports one and the whole thing quickly turns into a bit of a kludge if you try to scale it out. It is kind of surprising that Hue keeps expanding their line of bulbs and devices but does not address the capacity limits of the bridge.

I'm not sure that is true for Lifx bulbs. I know my Amazon Echos will keep trying and eventually get an address but I have had bulbs show as offline in the Lifx app when they have been powered on for hours. The only way to get them back is to power cycle them at the switch so they can have another try at DHCP. This has me leaning towards keeping a switch wired to the bulbs but always left on so I have the option to power cycle them if I need to. I might just add voice alerts to tell me if somebody turns them off by mistake but I don't think anyone is likely to mess with them.

Another thought: If I have my bulbs on switches I can stagger the turn-on times so as not to overload the DHCP server in my router. If they are powered all the time then every power glitch during the day will cause them all to reboot at once and some of them might fail to get a response from DHCP. I have 21 bulbs in my outside setup and they do have reserved addresses but they still have to go through the DHCP transaction when they restart.

I have whole house surge protector but it is useless for the sort of 4 or 5 second voltage drops where it looks like something just loaded down the electric lines (probably tree branches shorting the system and shunting a bunch of power to ground someplace). I like the design of the Inovelli Z-Wave switches that can be configured for either physical or logical control without rewiring. Wish Insteon would adopt that design.

Another thought just occurred to me. We get some pretty nasty power glitches at my house. Maybe letting the switch disconnect power from the Lifx bulbs during the day is cheap insurance to avoid having to replace a bunch of expensive bulbs that fail prematurely due to bad power events?

Yes I leave them on all year. I use other colors for Valentines Day, Independence Day, St. Patrick's Day, and Halloween. The rest of the time they run white (or sometimes yellow in the summer to keep the bugs down). I set them manually at the run up to each Holiday and then manually back to white after the Holiday passes. The automatic schedule just turns them on and off at the appropriate time and they remember the color they were last set to. Temps have ranged from -20F to +98F and the bulbs have performed fine all year. After I get Polisys I may disable the ISY schedule and leave the switches on all the time instead using the Lifx Node to control on and off as well as color using just Lifx commands. I will also use the Node to set the color scheme based on calendar instead of manually setting for each holiday. I also plan to set up some scenes that I can trigger using buttons on an Insteon Keypad. Finally I plan to set a panic button on my Elk security keypads to turn on the exterior lights and have the Lifx bulbs in 3 of my lamp posts flash between red and white as marker to guide emergency services to my house. Of course I am assuming Polisys will actually be able to do all this.

For what its worth I have several locations where outside lights are controlled by Insteon dimmers. In December I replaced these bulbs with Lifx color units so I could do Holiday theme lighting and just set the switches to 100% and 0.1 seconds for ramp rate. I carefully went through all of the scenes that control these switches to make sure those settings were replicated for every way the switches could be turned on. I have seen no negative impact to the Lifx bulbs and don't really expect to but my case is just one data point. I don't know if anyone else has had issues doing this.

Smartlabs needs to release a color smart bulb that uses the Insteon protocol so folks don't have to use those risky Wi-Fi devices.

I like the Hue feature that turns your motion activated lights on to different colors depending on the time of day. I can walk through my house between 11PM and 8AM and see where I'm going without getting getting blinded by a bright white light or stumbling about in excessively dimmed down light. Also colors for Holidays are fun. Also a single lamp or bulb used as an alert indicator is lame. If there is a red alert then everything should turn red... have you never watched Star Trek?

In the US 2.4 GHz only has 3 non-overlapping channels: 1, 6, and 11. 2.4 GHz is also too high a frequency to provide good penetration for IoT devices that need to operate in old work metal electrical boxes or in walls made of brick or stone. You would also need special routers or Wireless Access Points with multiple radios to handle the traffic on different 2.4 GHz channels.

There is no one size fits all but I wonder if there should be? Home Wi-Fi for networking would be pretty messed up there were a dozen different Wi-Fi schemes using different frequencies and you had to deploy several of them to use all of the different Wi-Fi devices you own. It would be nice to have a clear winner on a Home Automation protocol standard so companies could compete on features, price, and quality rather than on competing closed ecosystems.

Great technology, super limited range of devices. Insteon, UPB, and Lutron Clearwave all suffer from a thin product catalog with lots of gaps. None of them offer bulbs or even socket modules. No power monitoring within the modules. Lutron limits certain options to certain lines so no Caseta Thermostat or wired keypad, None offers RGB indicator LEDs on their switches and keypads. etc. Not what you want to see if you are picking a new standard to invest in and use for many years.

Where I live we are still waiting for the full build out of 4G or fiber or fast cable even. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for 5G to do anything.

So what would be the best technology to migrate to if Insteon were to fade away? I see Lifx now has candle bulbs and a switch coming out and their bulbs give you options not available from any other product (like polychrome bulbs) so maybe Wi-Fi is the way to go. My concern though is that WiFi is not keeping up with the rate of expansion of IoT devices so might be another dead end as folks scale out their Smart Homes. ISY users might be doing things on a scale larger than mainstream folks do today but our "cutting edge" will be business as usual before you know it. The new 802.11ax Wi-Fi standard (aka Wi-Fi 6) is supposed to help with the expansion of IoT but it was designed when that meant switches, locks, and thermostats. In this new age of individual bulbs, window sensors, leak sensor, etc, etc, it is going to already have fallen behind on day one of its release. And as others have pointed out, consumer routers are not coming anywhere close to ramping up to the processing power needed to handle what could be several hundred HA devices in even a modest sized house (don't forget the smart appliances, smart plumbing fixtures, and Wi-Fi enabled mouse traps.) I could point out similar shortcomings in every other protocol option out there today as well. The sad truth is that while all of the different protocols are fine for casual "starter systems" there is no protocol available today that has the full spectrum of devices that folks want combined with the horsepower and scaleability needed to justify a full blown commitment. Maybe the safest bet is X-10 since it at least has the track record of being a good investment based on it having been around more than 40 years now. Plus many of your older Insteon devices speak X-10 so you can re-purpose them when SmartHome goes under.