ISY Noob Advice?

[stusviews]

Ah, the travails of trying the easy way. As time passes, you may come across other scenes that don't work as expected. Some may have to bee recreated in their entirety. Ir you may be lucky

[apostolakisl]

 

I was just reading the manual, and saw that feature!  When I add a device, there is an option "add devices found in links and keep existing links". It says the option not only adds the devices but also automatically creates scenes! And now you imply it will do this recursively for my whole network? !!!

I have resisted buying this device for a couple of years because of a whole slew of misconceptions about what it did. After a few days of trying to get the Insteon Hub2 to do anything useful I gave up in disgust on that toy, and decided to actually take a serious look at the ISY. Once I really looked into it was almost immediately obvious that it did everything Houselinc did plus what the Hub was claimed to do.

 

 

goldenslot

 

 

You are correct.

 

The only caveat.  There are often orphan links or bogus links on devices which can mess things up.  This can happen for a variety of reasons dating back to the beginning of your Insteon installation.  Also, ISY has no idea what your scenes and devices should be named, so you still have to go through and figure out what each discovered scene/device actually is and name it.

 

For these reasons, it is often just easier to wipe your network and start over.  Aside from avoiding having to click on/off for each thing and run around your house to see what just turned on/off so you can name it, it will guarantee you a clean healthy set of links.  If you have the ISY pro model, it is really easy to re-create even large installations.  The pro model lets you drag and drop all your devices into scenes and then once you have the whole thing designed, you hit the write button and go have lunch.  When you get back, it is done.  The non-pro model writes the changes each time you drag and drop something.  So you have to wait anywhere from 2 seconds to maybe 10 or 15 seconds for a really large scene on each drag/drop.

 

It doesn't hurt anything to try and do a network crawl first and see what the result is.  To do a crawl, you will need to manually add at least one item.  You will probably find you have some devices that are not in a scene or groups of devices that have no scene pathway back to the main group.  In this case, you need to manually add at least one device in each "island" of devices.

[Scottmichaelj]

goldenslot

Whats with the advertising for a Casino? You now in the Casino business? Something we should know about here? You flying in all us ISY whales for free nights, food and large lines of credit to play with?

[larryllix]

Whats with the advertising for a Casino? You now in the Casino business? Something we should know about here? You flying in all us ISY whales for free nights, food and large lines of credit to play with?

Just a spammer with some smarts to get past mental filters. On Tapatalk the link shows up very clearly whilst on the forum with IE 11 it is obscure.

 

I recognised the spammer's name from a  previous experience here, or another forum. $0.05 per spam link posted make a great stay at home job for those with low morals.

 

We had a family of spammers living down the street from us. Google and Yaho launched a law suit agsinst them and extracted (rumour on news medias) over $200K out of court from them. Years later a few other biggies were launching a multi-mullion dollar suit against them. I never heard the end of it but they owned two large homes on the street, with pools etc.., without apparent jobs elsewhere.

[AZPhil]

You are correct.

 

The only caveat.  There are often orphan links or bogus links on devices which can mess things up.  This can happen for a variety of reasons dating back to the beginning of your Insteon installation.  Also, ISY has no idea what your scenes and devices should be named, so you still have to go through and figure out what each discovered scene/device actually is and name it.

 

For these reasons, it is often just easier to wipe your network and start over.  Aside from avoiding having to click on/off for each thing and run around your house to see what just turned on/off so you can name it, it will guarantee you a clean healthy set of links.  If you have the ISY pro model, it is really easy to re-create even large installations.  The pro model lets you drag and drop all your devices into scenes and then once you have the whole thing designed, you hit the write button and go have lunch.  When you get back, it is done.  The non-pro model writes the changes each time you drag and drop something.  So you have to wait anywhere from 2 seconds to maybe 10 or 15 seconds for a really large scene on each drag/drop.

 

It doesn't hurt anything to try and do a network crawl first and see what the result is.  To do a crawl, you will need to manually add at least one item.  You will probably find you have some devices that are not in a scene or groups of devices that have no scene pathway back to the main group.  In this case, you need to manually add at least one device in each "island" of devices.

 

As thread starter, I find it amusing that some spammer repeats a post of mine (delayed ~a month), and gets a reply!  (Basically the same reply I got a month ago.)

 

BTW, I had very little problem with the results of my scan. I ran the network for a week or two with both the old PLM and the ISY active, but the old PLM was basically doing the work. With only a little bit of study, It became clear that many scenes created by the scan were links stored in the old PLM to support HL "Events" I had defined. Obviously not needed by the ISY so I simply deleted those. The remaining scenes were all easily recognized, and I simply renamed those. that took only a few minutes.  . 

 

When I eventually removed the PLM supporting HL (had to --- it went into its "let's play dead" act) I then realized I was left with a lot of associated links in the devices. By deleting the PLM, these links were all marked "deleted". I subsequently discovered that Restore Device would completely clean up the links table in a device. It took about 15 minutes to clean up all of them. Programming has been a breeze.

 

The only real linking issues I have run into are with my mini-remotes. In several cases, I am now using mini-remote buttons strictly as program triggers, with no linking at all. That has resolved a lot of hassles. 

 

My biggest issue with the ISY to date is JAVA. I am running 32-bit Java on a 64-bit machine and the Oracle programmers who make the installers evidently have only the barest acquaintance with Microsoft. It took me a lot of tinkering over a couple of weeks to get a jnlp launch shortcut working reliably at the beginning. This morning I updated Java per Oracle's persistent insistence. This threw everything out of kilter.  Back to square one.  I then found a web site that lists all of the registry keys---for 64 bit Java. I spent about an hour cleaning up the registry (while translating everything to 32-bit "wow3264node" standards).  

 

I now have that fixed such that (knock on wood) it may actually survive the next Java update. 

 

Meanwhile, my network has been running like a top.  Just updated to 4.6.2.  However, "Help About" in the Admin console says I am still running the 4.5.4 UI.  Presumably that is because I need to replace the jnlp file, which I have stored in %appdata%\UDI.  (Or I need to edit the one I have) 

 

Did I mention I DESPISE JAVA?

[apostolakisl]

As thread starter, I find it amusing that some spammer repeats a post of mine (delayed ~a month), and gets a reply!  (Basically the same reply I got a month ago.)

 

BTW, I had very little problem with the results of my scan. I ran the network for a week or two with both the old PLM and the ISY active, but the old PLM was basically doing the work. With only a little bit of study, It became clear that many scenes created by the scan were links stored in the old PLM to support HL "Events" I had defined. Obviously not needed by the ISY so I simply deleted those. The remaining scenes were all easily recognized, and I simply renamed those. that took only a few minutes.  . 

 

When I eventually removed the PLM supporting HL (had to --- it went into its "let's play dead" act) I then realized I was left with a lot of associated links in the devices. By deleting the PLM, these links were all marked "deleted". I subsequently discovered that Restore Device would completely clean up the links table in a device. It took about 15 minutes to clean up all of them. Programming has been a breeze.

 

The only real linking issues I have run into are with my mini-remotes. In several cases, I am now using mini-remote buttons strictly as program triggers, with no linking at all. That has resolved a lot of hassles. 

 

My biggest issue with the ISY to date is JAVA. I am running 32-bit Java on a 64-bit machine and the Oracle programmers who make the installers evidently have only the barest acquaintance with Microsoft. It took me a lot of tinkering over a couple of weeks to get a jnlp launch shortcut working reliably at the beginning. This morning I updated Java per Oracle's persistent insistence. This threw everything out of kilter.  Back to square one.  I then found a web site that lists all of the registry keys---for 64 bit Java. I spent about an hour cleaning up the registry (while translating everything to 32-bit "wow3264node" standards).  

 

I now have that fixed such that (knock on wood) it may actually survive the next Java update. 

 

Meanwhile, my network has been running like a top.  Just updated to 4.6.2.  However, "Help About" in the Admin console says I am still running the 4.5.4 UI.  Presumably that is because I need to replace the jnlp file, which I have stored in %appdata%\UDI.  (Or I need to edit the one I have) 

 

Did I mention I DESPISE JAVA?

 

Yes, I realized after seeing the second post from that spammer that was clearly written by Michel and just copied.  Oh well.

 

The issue with the desktop icon going away can be fixed by clearing your java cache and installing the jnlp file again which is probably still sitting in your download folder.  But I agree, I am not a fan of java.  It seems like I have to screw with it every other week or so with all the constant updates.  In all likelihood, most of those updates are completely not needed, but you never know which ones truly fix a security hole and which ones are for things that don't impact me at all.

 

Glad to hear that you were able to get your system up with relatively little hastle.