i3 Keypad Scenes and Loads Question

[Dave Schiller]

As part of a home addition I am about to purchase some new Insteon devices. The existing portion of my house already uses Insteon switches and I've already purchased an eisy to replace my aging ISY99.

In my current setup I have many 8-button KPLs where I use a column of 4 buttons to control scenes for a single room - i.e. [Bedroom Highest, Bedroom High, Bedroom Med, Bedroom Low]. In most of these situations a single 8-button KPL controls 2 rooms - the left hand column controls one room, the right hand column controls the other. Since button A of the KPL controls the load - to ulitlize the KPL as I've described I've found that the KPL cannot control a load. I typically install them in a circuit wired for a 3-way switch, use the other switch to control the load, and terminate the load wire on the KPL. This allows the column of buttons on the keypad to control a scene with a variety of room loads and not have to worry about whether the KPL controlled load is on or off for a given scene. This has worked great for me - but it is subject to the limitation that I need another device to control the load.

To setup the keypad this way I create a scene for each button [Highest, High, Med, Low] and then make the other three buttons responders to the scene. When the top button [Highest], that scene is setup so the other three buttons in the column are set to off. In practice this means only one button is illuminated at a time.

I haven't purchased any i3 keypad devices yet, but based on what I've read about them I think I could use them in the same manner i described above (with only 1 column, of course). My question is whether there is a way to implement the same functionality using the new i3 keypad and also have it control a load. I've been trying to understand how the ability to assign the load to different buttons is implemented and whether there is a way to take advantage of it for my purposes.

If anyone can help me think of a way to use the i3 keypad to control a load and still implement four scenes as described above I'd be very grateful.

Thanks,
Dave

[daedalus01]

The i3 KP has 4 buttons, with (by default) the top button controlling the load.

The i3 KPs unfortunately only have 4 buttons, and one of them (by default, the top button) controls the load, so you'd be sharing a "load control" function with a scene controller function on the same button. There's probably a hacky way to handle this with programs or other work, but I don't think it'll be nearly as clean as what you have on your 8-button KPLs.

The i3 KP can be configured to set a different button to control the load, but unfortunately it's only done so via Insteon Hub & Director app - eisy does not (yet?) support this feature. A few of us started another thread specifically related to that aspect, where Insteon confirmed they've provided documentation over to UDI on how to integrate this, so perhaps it's only a matter of time on that item: