Is it Possible to Monitor all Insteon Traffic?

[justin.cool]

I have had several communication issues that turned out to be caused by lots of communication traffic from errant devices. For example, the Venstar Thermostat Humidity reporting bug, the Switchlink V.35 bug, as well as a few others.

 

I has occured to me that a tool that would allow me to just monitor ALL insteon traffic, not just what the Event Viewer shows, would have been a big help and timesaver. To be fair, the event viewer was a big help. However, from what I understand, there CAN be a lot of traffic that the ISY would not report / see at all. And that "unseen by the ISY" traffic is what I am thinking would be good to monitor somehow.

 

Does such a tool exist? Or am I just missing something?

 

Justin in Dallas

[LeeG]

justin.cool

 

There is no tool available, at least none I have heard of, and I am sure the word would spread quickly if one did come on the market.

 

One of the problems is how to do the monitoring. The PLM is limited because it does not pass out traffic not addressed to it (device to device traffic for example). There is a Monitor mode that nobody uses because it is not reliable in catching all traffic do to the nature of how Insteon traffic moves on the powerline.

 

The other problem is Insteon products are limited to SmartLabs. X10 has several good tools for monitoring X10 traffic because that protocol is open. Perhaps when patents expire other companies will get involved allowing competition to improve things.

 

Lee

[ELA]

I am not convinced that being able to view all traffic would be a complete solution. I have seen instances where Insteon devices themselves appear to report corrupted messages.

How would you be sure that a monitoring device was "seeing" the same thing as the Insteon devices were? That detection thresholds, noise rejection and timing were all identical to the Insteon devices it was trying to monitor.

Relying on the checksum may not be as secure as one might hope given that Insteon devices themselves appear to report errant messages.

 

You also have to consider the basic communications issues of "too low of a signal strength" and noise that may prevent you from seeing all traffic accurately.

Any such monitor would probably have to be coupled with a very accurate time stamp to be able to catch data collisions.

 

At present using a recording Oscilloscope may be the best hope, coupled with the ISY issuance of commands and reporting of "known traffic".

 

I have tried using the PLM monitor mode without much success.

 

All that being said I do agree that it would be nice to have a Insteon PLM that reported all traffic.