Future in Insteon

[DAlter01]

12 minutes ago, lilyoyo1 said:

Insteon shows all the signs of a company  slowly folding up and about to go bankrupt. They appear to be living off somebody's daddy's estate money. If the Insteon protocol and their basic initial product offering hadn't been such good quality, they would only be a lingering name to reminisce about and ridicule.

Insteon shows all the signs of another one person company, working out of his garage. Insteon isn't a ship without a rudder, it is just a raft drifting over the falls.

We didn't know how good we had it when Joe owned the company. Yes, there were plenty of mistakes but there was at least a vision moving things forward.  There might have been two steps forward, one step to the side, one step back, stand in place and do circles for a while, and then two steps forward again.  But, in the end after all that movement, there was "progress" to keep things moving on a path that created a viable technology and company.  Now, as you suggest, it seems to just be adrift.  No discernable movement attributable to forethought, managment and, ......wait for it........leadership.

[DAlter01]

Uh oh, not looking good folks.  So I need 90 dimmers for my install.  I just got confirmation they are shipping me 24.  What in the world am I going to do with 24 dimmers when I need 90.  Let me think.....return them?  I'll call them on Monday to find out what the deal is but 24 stinking dimmers.  That is a joke.  

**** Update, Smarthome broke the order into multiple shipments for some reason.  AND, it appears they have shipped everything ordered so I retract my prior comments of concern.  It seems they did me right.  

[Teken]

 

My complete and utter disgust is seeing great technology just being pissed away which seems to be each year.

I’ll never understand how it is they can spend so much time developing something, releasing it into the wild, knowing the product is half baked?!?

At some point you iterate on the original concept.

To what goal?!?

To make more money and take market share! Yet Smartlabs will literally ship hardware that has no documentation or API explaining how something is supposed to work. Even worse is when the smatter of documents that are available don’t coincide with reality!

How can you sell your wares if it doesn’t operate as expected? How do you expect great companies like UDI to support your product if they aren’t provided support never mind accurate and timely technical information???

Having to reverse engineer something just so the basics operate as expected is complete bull sh^t.

2021 has arrived and once again I’ll restate what I said more than ten years ago. Which is the freaking boat has sunk and if they have any last measure of common sense the head clown will sell Smartlabs to a company that will harness the technology.

Everyone likes to bitch and rarely if ever offers guidance or best path. So I’ll restate what I did 10-15 years ago - yet again!

- License: Reach our to all industries and license out the tech so others can make it or work in concert with them to develop the next great thing.

- Promote: Give away the chips so startups and existing companies can R&D. Along with making products that integrate with their wares without investing too heavily in Insteon.

- Iterate: Build upon your success and stop racing to the bottom for price using the cheapest components known to man. Learn from your endless mistakes like the PLM, KPL, Hub failures . . .

- Open Source: Truly embrace the general public in this space. One only needs to see what UDI has done via their Polyglot framework. From a single NS to a hundred plus! If you reflect upon companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc look what software and integration exists for their software and products!

All Market: As stated up above take existing hardware and make it compliant to those markets power & frequency. Why would you ever not sell existing hardware to other countries because you’re too stupid to invest in yourself???

It’s not like there isn’t a demand. It’s not like you didn’t have time. It’s only been ten freaking years and you still offer a smattering of Hardware to other countries?!? You can’t certify and upgrade the entire line to support all power & frequencies???

Come on you inept [censored] . . .

Maybe this thread will hit a cord and something will happen.

[mwester]

Just adding to Teken's comments on a logical positive things that COULD be done...  I often dis on how the Insteon protocol is fundamentally compromised by modern switching power supplies -- a solid "go-forward" plan for power-line communications needs to make changes to accommodate that new reality.

Doing so would require a re-vamp of the Insteon protocol, basically using the same techniques things like WiFi-powerline-extenders that manage to put the signal over the entire AC cycle instead of the zero-crossing point.

But why stop there?  A next-gen Insteon device that could do that would have a lot more processing power and a lot more bandwidth to communicate.  I wonder what one might be able to do if you combined a network of "next-gen" sensors that can do what the folks at https://sense.com/ are doing.  Consider what a next-gen ISY hub might be able to do with detailed information on the AC waveforms observed by each device.  Might it signal impending LED bulb failure?  How about being able to detect a sump pump motor that's suddenly free-running instead of pumping?  Or a sump pump that's fighting a clogged eject pipe?  Or just detect that the garage door is in-motion by monitoring the A/C waveforms on the garage circuit... and get rid of all the IOLinc baloney?

There's so much that CAN be done.

[larryllix]

46 minutes ago, mwester said:

Just adding to Teken's comments on a logical positive things that COULD be done...  I often dis on how the Insteon protocol is fundamentally compromised by modern switching power supplies -- a solid "go-forward" plan for power-line communications needs to make changes to accommodate that new reality.

Doing so would require a re-vamp of the Insteon protocol, basically using the same techniques things like WiFi-powerline-extenders that manage to put the signal over the entire AC cycle instead of the zero-crossing point.

But why stop there?  A next-gen Insteon device that could do that would have a lot more processing power and a lot more bandwidth to communicate.  I wonder what one might be able to do if you combined a network of "next-gen" sensors that can do what the folks at https://sense.com/ are doing.  Consider what a next-gen ISY hub might be able to do with detailed information on the AC waveforms observed by each device.  Might it signal impending LED bulb failure?  How about being able to detect a sump pump motor that's suddenly free-running instead of pumping?  Or a sump pump that's fighting a clogged eject pipe?  Or just detect that the garage door is in-motion by monitoring the A/C waveforms on the garage circuit... and get rid of all the IOLinc baloney?

There's so much that CAN be done.

Just hitting the Home Depot chain with a package containing a Door sensor and LampLinc module to show the ignorant public their garage door is open, and then upsell a Hub/Smartbox to notify the cell phone app the garage door was left open, along with all the bells and whistles that could be added, once the cheap public is hooked on the idea. **SIGH** alas! I think Insteon knows garages and Insteon signals would be a losing battle and they don't pursue it. This attitude seems to reflect in all the products they already have and are dropping.