homeseer and ISY

[MarkJames]

I'm just wondering if anyone here has any insight into potential conflicts between homeseer and ISY.

 

To clarify, I use ISY parallel to homeseer. I like homeseer for TTS voice announcements throughout the house as well as some of the great plugins available such as mcsSprinkler (which is an absolutely mindnumbing piece of sprinkler control software!). At present my biggest desire is to use HSTouch on wall mounted ipads and android devices to control my ISY scenes through the ISY Insteon plugin and HSTouch server plugins.

 

I'm just curious if anyone has had issues with writing links to ISY devices while homeseer was connected to ISY. I'm not familiar with the method with which the two pieces of software communicate with one another so I'm keen to know if I should be disconnecting homeseer and its plugins before writing/changing link tables in ISY devices or if it doesn't matter. I've had a number of ISY crashes while writing links lately but they're usually related to scenes that involves dozens of links on dozens of controllers so I attribute the failures to the complexity of the writes. I've been shutting off homeseer to see if it makes a difference but it's so subjective that it's hard to tell.

 

mark

[bpwwer]

I'm just curious if anyone has had issues with writing links to ISY devices while homeseer was connected to ISY. I'm not familiar with the method with which the two pieces of software communicate with one another so I'm keen to know if I should be disconnecting homeseer and its plugins before writing/changing link tables in ISY devices or if it doesn't matter. I've had a number of ISY crashes while writing links lately but they're usually related to scenes that involves dozens of links on dozens of controllers so I attribute the failures to the complexity of the writes. I've been shutting off homeseer to see if it makes a difference but it's so subjective that it's hard to tell.

 

mark

 

Hi Mark,

 

I don't make a lot of changes to the ISY since my configuration is fairly stable at this point so I don't test a lot of scene modifications scenarios. I do hear of occasional problems with the the ISY Plugin getting out sync with the ISY when doing a lot of administration tasks on the ISY. Restarting the plug-in/HomeSeer will correct that. In this case, shutting down HomeSeer while making the changes can help prevent the out-of-sync problems. No one has reported problems with the plug-in causing (or being suspected of causing) the ISY to crash.

 

When changing scenes like that, the ISY could be sending a lot of data to the plug-in, but it should be mostly ISY->plugin so I wouldn't think data flowing in that direction would cause problems for the ISY. The plug-in does queue up incoming messages from the ISY so it won't cause the ISY to block if it gets behind in processing the messages.

 

You can try turning on the debug log output on the plug-in. This will generate a large amount of log output to the HomeSeer log while you are making the changes. It may help to know what the last message sent by the ISY was before it crashed, but if you're not seeing errors in the log, there's probably not anything else that the additional logging will reveal.

 

Bob

[MarkJames]

Thanks, Bob,

 

I know what you mean about not making many changes once your system is stable. I was the same till recently when I did a reno and ended up changing a bunch of switches out. Then last month Smarthome put their custom engraved buttons on sale so I ordered a few sets in black along with black KPL's for my bedroom. I find the regular KPL's too bright at night. I have a few scenes that turn all the lights off in the house along with the KPL buttons associated with them. With nearly 200 devices in the house - multiply that by a factor of 2 or 3 for KPL buttons and the end result is a scene that could have several hundred links to write when I add or subtract a device. Whenever I mess with that particular scene it's an invitation for disaster - I get incomplete writes and multiple hangs of the ISY. It usually takes a few days of checking and rewriting devices till all is OK. I wasn't sure if that was just the way it is or if homeseer and in particular the ISY plugin for it might be causing part of the trouble.