Insteon Hubs on eBay going for $300 plus

[larryllix]

55 minutes ago, apostolakisl said:

Am I missing something here, but are Raspberry Pi's now rare?  I think I paid $30 for my last one, now it appears they are all like $300.  My father in law has an Insteon Hub he used with SH and I see from this thread he can hook it up to a RPi running HA.  So I was like, great, I'll pick up a rpi for him.  But what the heck?

Yup. Now they are pushing the RPi4 with 8GB, needs fan cooling and so on. Meanwhile you can buy a Windows 11 PC with HDD and 8 GB Ram for about the same price.

Gone are the days of the little cheapie computer. Some of the chopped down versions are much cheaper but you still need to add a keyboard, mouse, monitor, case, power supply and a few cords and SD card to make it actually be something usable.

[Bumbershoot]

9 hours ago, larryllix said:

Meanwhile you can buy a Windows 11 PC with HDD and 8 GB Ram for about the same price.

I just bought a Windows 10 PC simply to run Elk RP2 on for $145.  Nice little unit, too.

[smithlevenson]

11 hours ago, apostolakisl said:

Am I missing something here, but are Raspberry Pi's now rare?  I think I paid $30 for my last one, now it appears they are all like $300.  My father in law has an Insteon Hub he used with SH and I see from this thread he can hook it up to a RPi running HA.  So I was like, great, I'll pick up a rpi for him.  But what the heck?

I have been able to get them in-person at Microcenter for MSRP, but they are subject to the same chip shortage as everything else. 

[MrBill]

11 hours ago, apostolakisl said:

Am I missing something here, but are Raspberry Pi's now rare?  I think I paid $30 for my last one, now it appears they are all like $300.  My father in law has an Insteon Hub he used with SH and I see from this thread he can hook it up to a RPi running HA.  So I was like, great, I'll pick up a rpi for him.  But what the heck?

Yes they are.  I found one on Amazon relatively quickly for my son's house after the Insteon shutdown, but the same "kit" with Pi, basic case, memory card, power supply and other doo-dad's you don't actually need was twice the price I paid for the same 18 months earlier.  They are largely out of stock.

If it's purpose is for Home Assistant and he doesn't mind waiting til mid-july, check out Home Assistant Yellow.  https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-yellow  the complete first item on the list doesn't ship until end of year, but if you instead buy the Kit and either the 2gb or 4gb Raspberry Pi compute board, you should receive both components in the first half of July.   (I'd recommend the 4gb, Home Assistant and all the add-on's become addictive).  O ordered to upgrade my HA installation and to support the HA project, the custom board has a zigbee (to be upgradded to Matter) controller built in.  

[smithlevenson]

10 hours ago, larryllix said:

Gone are the days of the little cheapie computer. Some of the chopped down versions are much cheaper but you still need to add a keyboard, mouse, monitor, case, power supply and a few cords and SD card to make it actually be something usable.

You can run them headless with nothing but a power supply and a $5 SD card. The new ones are much more powerful, but there are very few HA applications that need a new Pi4 with 8GB Ram and a 500 GB SD card. 

[mmb]

18 hours ago, MrBill said:

I read the HA release notes last night.  HA puts out a major update the first Wednesday of every month, and about 6-9 minor releases follow during the month.  I've learned not to load the first release of the month, I always wait until about .4 or .5 in a week to 10 days after the first Wednesday.

HA dropped another update this morning.  Seems all the endpoint device settings are available eg. ramp rate, brightness, etc.  I haven't tested them yet.

You're right, they're moving fast.

[MrBill]

1 minute ago, mmb said:

You're right, they're moving fast.

As mentioned they push out a major update on the First Wednesday of every month, then about 6-9 minor releases follow in the same month (April had 7), as I recall March was 9.   Most of the time you can load the .0 release and not feel pain, but twice I've been caught in first Wednesday of the month bugs (one involved the ISY integration and it also affected @asbril), so I just wait a week to 10 days after the first Wednesday.  Another piece of advice is always check the release note for "breaking changes"... not a single month goes by that I don't see someone ask somewhere...."the HA update broke my ____ I can't figure it out" followed by screenshots and logs... then a reply... "did you read the release notes?  that's in breaking changes" or "that's covered in the release notes, it moved from switch. to light. you'll need to manually update automatons" and so on....

[smithlevenson]

17 minutes ago, mmb said:

HA dropped another update this morning.  Seems all the endpoint device settings are available eg. ramp rate, brightness, etc.  I haven't tested them yet.

You're right, they're moving fast.

I mean just to have super active development is exciting. 

[MrBill]

1 minute ago, smithlevenson said:

I mean just to have super active development is exciting. 

It's github's second most active project.

[mmb]

1 hour ago, mmb said:

HA dropped another update this morning.  Seems all the endpoint device settings are available eg. ramp rate, brightness, etc.  I haven't tested them yet.

You're right, they're moving fast.

X10 support is available too under advanced.

There are several display bugs so beware.

[asbril]

37 minutes ago, MrBill said:

As mentioned they push out a major update on the First Wednesday of every month, then about 6-9 minor releases follow in the same month (April had 7), as I recall March was 9.   Most of the time you can load the .0 release and not feel pain, but twice I've been caught in first Wednesday of the month bugs (one involved the ISY integration and it also affected @asbril), so I just wait a week to 10 days after the first Wednesday.  Another piece of advice is always check the release note for "breaking changes"... not a single month goes by that I don't see someone ask somewhere...."the HA update broke my ____ I can't figure it out" followed by screenshots and logs... then a reply... "did you read the release notes?  that's in breaking changes" or "that's covered in the release notes, it moved from switch. to light. you'll need to manually update automatons" and so on....

My issue is different.....  After linking ISY on Polisy to HA the latter no longer links to my ISY. Supposedly HA can link to more than one ISY. I removed IoP from HA and tried to link ISY back again, but systematically it shows "not loaded".

[randyth]

For people who are fortunate enough to have a spare PLM and Insteon Hub, any opinions on whether one would be better than the other? For example, does the Hub have a stronger dual-band RF transceiver than the 2413S or 2413U?

[MrBill]

13 minutes ago, mmb said:

X10 support is available too under advanced.

the 2242 hub supports X10, the 2245 Hub does not.  (The PLMs also support X10).  The Insteon Integration can not provide X10 support for the 2245 because the hardware does not support it.

5 minutes ago, asbril said:

My issue is different.....  After linking ISY on Polisy to HA the latter no longer links to my ISY. Supposedly HA can link to more than one ISY. I removed IoP from HA and tried to link ISY back again, but systematically it shows "not loaded".

That's a different issue than the one I was reffering to above.  (the one above was the very old one-- perhaps a year now, where the integration couldn't start because HA was timing out too soon.)

HA can link two ISY's, I had it set up at one point, but don't at this moment.  The May HA release (last Wednesday's) just made IoP auto discovery possible.  From the detailed release notes:

Quote

Add discovery support for polisy to isy994 (@bdraco - #70940) (isy994 docs)

 

[randyth]

45 minutes ago, randyth said:

For people who are fortunate enough to have a spare PLM and Insteon Hub, any opinions on whether one would be better than the other? For example, does the Hub have a stronger dual-band RF transceiver than the 2413S or 2413U?

After a tad bit of research, I found this old post from the HA forums regarding Hub (2245) vs. PLM (serial modem):

The 2245 is not as reliable as the serial modem. In short, the 2245 only provides a Web interface to communicate with it so it has to be polled. The polling uses a “circular buffer” inside the 2245 that can overload, and even worse the 2245 itself can sometimes clear out before being read, so information can get lost.

[apostolakisl]

5 hours ago, smithlevenson said:

I have been able to get them in-person at Microcenter for MSRP, but they are subject to the same chip shortage as everything else. 

Yeah, I saw that if I fly up to Columbus, OH they have one in stock.

[smithlevenson]

Just now, apostolakisl said:

Yeah, I saw that if I fly up to Columbus, OH they have one in stock.

Offff. I am happy to assist if you want me to grab one next time I they are in stock in Atlanta.

[apostolakisl]

1 minute ago, smithlevenson said:

Offff. I am happy to assist if you want me to grab one next time I they are in stock in Atlanta.

Don't go to any trouble, but if you happen to be there and they happen to have one, please pick one up.  I'm guessing that HA doesn't need a whole lot of horsepower, so I suspect even a Zero W would do the trick.

[smithlevenson]

1 minute ago, apostolakisl said:

Don't go to any trouble, but if you happen to be there and they happen to have one, please pick one up.  I'm guessing that HA doesn't need a whole lot of horsepower, so I suspect even a Zero W would do the trick.

Sure. If I see one I will grab it and ping you. 

[apostolakisl]

39 minutes ago, smithlevenson said:

Sure. If I see one I will grab it and ping you. 

Thx.  I do have a pi zero without wifi, do you suppose a usb wifi or usb ethernet adapter will work or will it require all kinds of screwing around with drivers and stuff?

[smithlevenson]

1 minute ago, apostolakisl said:

Thx.  I do have a pi zero without wifi, do you suppose a usb wifi or usb ethernet adapter will work or will it require all kinds of screwing around with drivers and stuff?

I haven't used a zero. USB wifi works on Pi3 but I haven't tried a usb dongle. Happy to try if I can find mine. 

[asbril]

3 hours ago, MrBill said:

the 2242 hub supports X10, the 2245 Hub does not.  (The PLMs also support X10).  The Insteon Integration can not provide X10 support for the 2245 because the hardware does not support it.

That's a different issue than the one I was reffering to above.  (the one above was the very old one-- perhaps a year now, where the integration couldn't start because HA was timing out too soon.)

HA can link two ISY's, I had it set up at one point, but don't at this moment.  The May HA release (last Wednesday's) just made IoP auto discovery possible.  From the detailed release notes:

 

Thanks, HA DOES discover both my ISY and IoP, but for a weird reason it does not connect to my ISY as before, even though I am 100% sure that I put the correct URL:port and username/password. I have tried numerous times.

[MrBill]

23 minutes ago, asbril said:

Thanks, HA DOES discover both my ISY and IoP, but for a weird reason it does not connect to my ISY as before, even though I am 100% sure that I put the correct URL:port and username/password. I have tried numerous times.

For the ISY994 there should be no port number, for polisy it should be :8080.   It's exactly what shows up in ISY Finder window without the /desc on the right end.

[mmb]

8 minutes ago, MrBill said:

For the ISY994 there should be no port number, for polisy it should be :8080.   It's exactly what shows up in ISY Finder window without the /desc on the right end.

I'm curious to know what functionality do I gain by linking HA to an ISY?

[MrBill]

2 minutes ago, mmb said:

I'm curious to know what functionality do I gain by linking HA to an ISY?

Every node and designated variables from ISY appear as HA entities.   I started out using HA because I didn't like any of the mobile apps available a couple years ago (UD mobile has changed that landscape since) I started using HA just so I could use it as a front end to the ISY...   Since then I've added on the HA side integrations that ISY doesn't yet support (zigbee for example).  Phone app tho I use HA for both.

[asbril]

1 hour ago, MrBill said:

Every node and designated variables from ISY appear as HA entities.   I started out using HA because I didn't like any of the mobile apps available a couple years ago (UD mobile has changed that landscape since) I started using HA just so I could use it as a front end to the ISY...   Since then I've added on the HA side integrations that ISY doesn't yet support (zigbee for example).  Phone app tho I use HA for both.

@MrBill is right.  HA was an excellent solution before UD Mobile arrived. But now I mostly use UD Mobile on my phone and also on my computer (using Bluestack). But HA is pretty good and ? I paid one year in advance so I am trying to make best use of it. Also,  I am an active user of Chromecast and that is very user friendly on HA.