Help with Insteon suddenly went south

[gakran]

I have an ISY-99 with maybe 15 devices: various insteon swithlincs, a 8 button keypad, an outlet, and a dual band repeater. There are 3 X10 modules left controlled by an ISY program. I usually update ISY software to the latest beta, but I just backed down one update to 3.15 (if memory serves), once problems began.

 

My symptoms:

1) An Insteon Switchlinc switch will not stay on. I manually turn it on and it turns back off within a second. I have air-gapped this switch and factory reset, and disconnected all controllers but it still does this.

 

2) While debugging this, I deleted and re-linked various Insteon switches on the ISY web interface, but the ISY will get stuck updating the devices. It will seem to complete the update cycle since the progress bar hits 100%, but it will then repeat the update process over and over.

 

3) The progress bar also shows the links being updated, and seems to get stuck on [ X10] I6/Off (11). I no longer have an X10 device at I6. It is interesting that the Insteon switch mentioned in 1), was formerly programmed as X10 I6 before I bought the ISY.

 

4) I used an old X10 controller to monitor the powerline, and did see I6 commands continually going out. I eventually stopped these by air gapping the 8 button Insteon keypad. I deleted and relinked the keypad, but I still occasionally see the X10 I6 messages on the ISY.

 

Is there anyway to find all links to X10 address I6 is and delete them?

 

Tonight, I will air-gap the keypad and see if the 1) switch will stay on. (they have never been linked, but the keypad did seem to be generating X10 I6 messages and the switch had been programmed to X10 I6).

 

I am about ready to factory reset and start over, but I don't want to lose all my programs.

[LeeG]

gakran

 

First, disable ALL Programs and see if the SwitchLinc will stay On. Either a command is being sent to the SwitchLinc to turn Off or it is turning itself Off based on some load condition. Did this start after power interruptions?

 

X10 devices are not linked like Insteon devices. Insteon link records have no reference to X10 addresses, commands or devices. Of course an Insteon device can have an X10 address assigned but this never appears in any link record.

 

Note that a single progress bar does not reflect the total activity. Each update activity is reflected by a new progress bar so give the total process a change to complete. Watch the status flag/word in the lower left corner of the Admin Console.

 

Lee

[gakran]

I don't think we lost power recently. A few days ago, I did notice that one of the remaining X10 devices was not responding to the timed commands reliably. Yesterday, the switchlinc started acting up.

 

Why would the ISY progress bar message display " [ X10 ] I/6"

 

Is there a way to export all the programs, so that I could import them after a factory refresh?

 

I am trying to determine if this is a programming problem, corrupt config, bad switchlinc, bad PLM, bad ISY or some combination.

[LeeG]

gakran

 

‘Why would the ISY progress bar message display " [ X10 ] I/6"’

 

What operation was being performed?

 

I do not run with X10 device addresses assigned to any of my Insteon devices. X10 is just too unreliable. Perhaps a Restore Device was restoring a device and was in the process of restoring its X10 address. For sure it was not writing X10 information in an Insteon link record as there are no fields in a link record for X10 information.

 

The Tools | Diagnostics | Event Viewer with Device communications events selected will trace what the ISY is actually doing on the powerline when the X10 message is in the progress bar.

 

Hopefully someone who uses X10 addresses with their Insteon devices can jump in here.

 

Another SwitchLinc test would be to disconnect the red load wire and see if it remains On. What type of load is the SwitchLinc controlling?

 

There are Program Export/Import functions available. Right click on a Program name.

 

Note that UDI does not recommend doing a Factory Reset of the ISY.

 

Lee

[Michel Kohanim]

Hello gakran,

 

As LeeG indicated, we do not recommend factory reset as it may hide the underlying issue and it usually does not fix anything.

 

Program export only exports programs and not all your configuration. You need to have regular backup of your system to ensure that the system as a whole can be reprogrammed.

 

As far as X10 I/6, these are X10 messages being sent or received. If you still have your X10 controller, you might want to remove it and see if you still get those messages. There's no way to disable X10 messages that are received.

 

With kind regards,

Michel

[gakran]

So this may have been corrupted configuration. I disconnected the PLM, putting ISY in safe mode, and deleted all the devices. I added them back and things seem to be working. The Switchlinc is even behaving now after another reset.

 

Thanks for the help.