Road to Polisy - noob help

[DirkM]

Hello everybody,

I must admit that after upgrading my ISY-99i to ISY-994iZS/IR Pro in 2012 to control about 80 Insteon switches and sensors, I didn't spend much time on here because everything just worked. Other than adding a new switch here or there or replacing a brocken ICON device that finally gave up, my ISY-994i ran for years on 4.x without any issue (I'm still on my first PLM too). As an almost exclusive Apple household I was excited about HomeKit and even more excited to find HomeBridge-ISY a few years ago which allowed me to finally control my ISY scenes with Siri and the Home app on my iPhone by just adding a tiny rPi to my network.

A few weeks ago I came back here, mostly to see if there is an ISY successor in the works or any development that does not require JRE on the client anymore and was overwhelmed by all the new stuff. Release 5.x, ISY portal, Polyglot, PGC, NodeServers, Polisy - that was quite a bit to process and understand all at once. But it was exciting to see that there is something that potentially connects all the various HA systems back to ISY.

I have now updated my ISY to 5.0.16B, subscribed to ISY Portal, updated my rPi to run Polyglot and figured out how it differs from Polyglot Cloud. I got my Ecobee and MyQ connected, have a Polisy on order and kept reading through all the posts that are somehow related.

There are a few questions left though that I would appreciate some input on.

• If I'm not mistaken, my local ISY-994i will remain the HA controller for now. It's JAVA based admin portal will remain the to go place to configure ISY and my Insteon network.
• It's web based AJAX portal can be used to control devices and scenes but I find MobiLinc Pro or the HomeKit Home app on my phone more efficient to perform that task.
• Polisy will eventually replace the ISY but for now it is just a Polyglot appliance, preconfigured and fully supported by UDI
• With the Polisy I don't need PGC or ISY Portal because everything is done locally (there was a post about Polisy including 2 years of ISY portal access, which confused me because it is not clear yet why I need ISY Portal if I have a Polisy)
• Polyglot Cloud seems to be redundant if I have a local Polyglot server (rPi or Polisy)

And while I patiently wait for my Polisy to arrive, two more questions:

• Can I install HomeBridge on the Polisy to replace my rPi3 (Homebridge) and rPi4 (PG)?
• If I mess up the Polisy by installing stuff that I shouldn't have installed, is there a way to factory reset it (OS and settings)?
• If not, is there a way to create a USB drive to reinstall the Polisy OS from scratch? Maybe before booting it up the first time?

Thanks,
Dirk

[larryllix]

I would answer yes to everything asked.

 

I did some nasty things to my polisy and thought it would never get fixed. UDI is like a really good upholsterer. They can recover anything. UDX seems to be the package watchdog and manager.

 

Like drape manufacturers, UDI puts in enough hooks to adapt to almost anywhere, even after being hung for a long time.

 

Use ISY history as an example. I wouldn't say it is bulletproof, but I know Michel wears a very thick vest.

 

I am running three of my own firmwares on my polisy without any problem. It has the resources.

 

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