Linking battery-powered accessories and other observations

[Michel Kohanim]

Hi rccoleman,

 

Figuring out the address is one thing. Creating linkages it's another. For INSTEON HUB, that would be easy since you are communicating directly with the PLM and not using APIs. I do not know what Indigo does.

 

Please note that the issue is not that these are battery operated. The issue is that these devices are controllers only (they do not respond to events) so, unlike others, the PLM has to go into Slave mode and that never worked reliably through their APIs and with older devices.

 

With kind regards,

Michel

[rccoleman]

Hi rccoleman,

 

Figuring out the address is one thing. Creating linkages it's another. For INSTEON HUB, that would be easy since you are communicating directly with the PLM and not using APIs. I do not know what Indigo does.

 

Please note that the issue is not that these are battery operated. The issue is that these devices are controllers only (they do not respond to events) so, unlike others, the PLM has to go into Slave mode and that never worked reliably through their APIs and with older devices.

 

With kind regards,

Michel

 

Thanks for the clarification, Michel.  All I'm really interested in is automatic detection of address to avoid having to read it off of the label and type it in manually, so if that becomes possible in the future, it would make the initial configuration process much more user-friendly.

 

Any thoughts on this?

 

I'm also curious about the third observation in my original post.  Is there any way to edit device names as they're being added through Start Linking, or do you just have to take notes (mental or paper) and do it at the end?  I suspect that the days of onboarding lots of devices are long past for many of the frequent contributors here, but this is one of the areas that I think could be more polished to get a new user up and running more quickly.

 

Rob

[Michel Kohanim]

Hi Rob,

 

Thank you and we'll certainly look into it. This said, ISY creates links during Start Linking and this might cause other things that may require major regression testing.

 

With regards to names, we'll look into it but I very much doubt we'll be expending more time on changes to the Admin Console.

 

With kind regards,

Michel

[rccoleman]

Is the process changing in 5.0, perhaps addressing this concern? I'm reluctant to update to the beta considering that I just got everything up and running and it sounds like 5.0 is still a work in progress.

 

I haven't found a definite description of what's changing in 5.0 compared to 4.3.26. Is there anything you can point me to, or is just try it and see?

 

<Edit: Never mind. Found the Wiki page>