BACKUP PLM for ISY _ DO YOU HAVE ONE, SHOULD YOU?

[ELA]

My ISY->PLM just died. I have a new 2413S on the way from SM under warranty ( only 1.7yrs old).

 

I thought I had a spare but that was a 2413U. I had intended to swap the serial daughter board from the bad unit into the new 2413U if I ever had an issue ( assuming the serial brd was not the problem).

 

However since they are sending me a new 2413S under warranty I was not able to swap the serial daughter boards.

 

This leaves me down for a few days and I really miss my ISY!!!

 

Over time I had migrated towards a heavy emphasis on ISY directed items such as PIR detection actions, curtain control, and some scenes.

Not having my ISY now has me reconsidering some scenes that I might now reconfigure so they to not require the ISY in order to still be active.

 

My point here is that if you are heavily reliant on your ISY you might want to be sure to keep a spare PLM on hand ( if you do not already). Of course the ISY is so awesome I am assuming it will never be an issue

I know the older PLMs tended to fail with a limited lifespan. I was not sure if the new ones would last longer. 1.7 years was much too short and I will now be sure to have a compatible spare on hand.

[Michel Kohanim]

Hi ELA,

 

Excellent point ... this said, I am sad that you don't want to stock up on ISYs as well. Sometimes, they get really lonely and do need company

[Illusion]

Hi ELA,

 

Excellent point ... this said, I am sad that you don't want to stock up on ISYs as well. Sometimes, they get really lonely and do need company

 

Funny Michel

 

ELA,

 

I have most definitely considered keeping a spare, but I can never pull the trigger on the purchase. Each time I bail because of this probably flawed thought process:

 

Maybe soon they will come out with newer/better firmware. Or even better, maybe they will come out with a more advanced model with awesome new features. Like maybe one with a bigger database. Or faster processor. Or two external antennas. Or a bigger internal power supply that can again supply juice to the ISY. Or a pass thru outlet. Or the ultimate for me: switches to turn off power line and RF connectivity for troubleshooting.

 

I am kinda surprised there is not a pro model of this product with three times the price and some advanced features, as it is one of the most important components along with the ISY.

 

So I always pull the aux PlM from my cart before purchase, thinking surely soon there will be a pro model.

[ELA]

I am sure my ISY does get lonely since I moved it out into the garage. Especially now without the company of its tag-a-long PLM.

 

I agree with you Illusion. I don't really want to have an inferior, or less feature full product, that I never use and its warranty runs out sitting on a shelf. That was kind of my thinking in keeping a 2413U on hand. I could either use it for test or as a replacement for the system PLM. I prefer the USB version when doing testing. I figured I could swap out the daughter board if needed to the RS232 version for the a system replacement.

I thought the PLM would fail after the two year warranty and I could use the RS232 daughter board from the defective unit ( a slight gamble there as well).

 

It is nice to have a spare PLM for testing so it can serve a dual purpose.

 

(e.g.) It was great to be able to use the spare PLM to send a direct message to the suspect PLM in order to confirm it was defective. I also monitored the line with a OScope just to be absolutely sure the PLC transceiver section was not operating.

 

A Pro model would be great. Or at least a more robust model for use with the ISY. I would certainly be willing to pay a little more for a reliability increase.

[Michel Kohanim]

ELA/Illusion,

 

I was just kidding. We have gone through extensive design and implementation exercises to make sure ISY runs without a crash. That's why we do not use a watchdog timer (even though we can enable it).

 

And, looking at our history, the number of units that had irreparable hardware failure is less than 0.001%. For those that did have repairable hardware failure (about 0.1%), the problem was the SD Card which is easily fixed by changing the SD Card, reinstalling firmware, and restoring your backup.

 

So, as much as I would love you all to have multiple ISYs as backup, based on the above statistics, it really does not make any sense and you would be wasting your money.

 

As far as new hardware, we will always provide very fair upgrade pricing.

 

With kind regards,

Michel

[Illusion]

Michel!!

 

I worry you may have misunderstood...

 

We know you are kidding about the spare ISYs.

 

Both ELA and I are talking about better PLMs. Although it is cool to know your failure rates. Thanks for that little tidbit.

[ELA]

Michel,

 

I have always felt that the ISY was a good quality piece of hardware/software. Thanks for sharing the statistics that prove that to be the case.

 

To be fair to the PLM it does have the nasty job of having to directly interface with the potentially harsh 120VAC power distribution environment in order to accomplish its PLC communications. I would love to hear the failure statistics along with the root case analysis of PLM failures.

 

If mine were not under warranty I had intended to further diagnose why it failed.

While I did test and confirmed no PLC transceiver ability I am guessing it had even an even larger problem in that it would not Factory Reset either.

 

Maybe we need redundant PLMs to backup the most excellent ISY stats

 

I am somewhat dreading replacing my PLM. I read several threads on how to Replace a PLM so that did not seem to be much of a chore. The ISY appears to do a great job of handling that task.

 

But I had not considered the RF devices and now that bothers me. The need to get on a ladder and take apart (&wake up) 6 PIR sensors and two triggerlincs does not excite me one bit.

[LeeG]

As far as the RF devices are concerned just let the updates fail. Then put each into linking mode and select Write Updates to Device. Be sure to complete one before starting the next. Trying to put two RF devices into linking mode at the same time cancels out both.

[Brian H]

I have spares. Mostly from updating to a later PLM. The older firmware ones could get me by until a new replacement could be obtained.

[gatchel]

I have always thought about having spare Insteon Devices but the major limiting factor is that there is no way to update the firmware on switches, etc. I can't stand not having that functionality in this day and age, therefore I keep no spares. Fortunately, most of the devices that I have that failed have been covered under warranty, lately. Not so much in the early Insteon days.

[ELA]

Thanks for the replies,

 

Thank you LeeG for the additional instructions.

I had hoped you would say that I could simply wave my arms in front of the PIR detectors and they would wake up long enough to relink

 

The replacement just arrived. Let the fun begin.

[LeeG]

ELA

 

I hope the "Update With Motion On" will eventually be implemented in the ISY but not today. It is such a well received function in HL. The original HL implementation was poor because it tried to do more than simply write updates. When HL withdrew the function because of the poor implementation lots of folks were unhappy. They put the function back with a good design this time.

[ELA]

Thanks LeeG,

Now you have peaked my interest .

It sounds as though you are saying that it is possible to write a link record ( or configuration updates?) to a PIR device within some window of opportunity after motion detection then?

Any specifics you could possibly offer? If it is not too complicated I would like to experiment with it in my custom tester.

[LeeG]

A Motion On is always used as the event perhaps because a Motion Sensor can operate in On Only mode. When updates are pending and a Motion On is received a command is sent to the Motion Sensor to keep it from going to sleep. This must be done quickly to prevent the MS from going to sleep in the normal fashion. Don't remember the command code right off but I'm sure I've got that information somewhere. After that the pending updates are written just as though the MS was put into linking mode manually, When the updates are complete another command is issued to allow the MS to go back to sleep.

 

Really pretty simple but the initial command to keep the MS awake has to be done quickly. Also if the ending command to allow the MS to sleep is missed the MS battery will drain quickly. I wrote a Powerhome macro that configures the Motion Sensor options when a Motion On triggers the macro. It takes two motion on messages, the first allows the current options to be retrieved and the second motion on is used to write any changes back. I did it initially as a proof of concept. The macro is not very sophisticated but it does allow the MS options to be retrieved and changed without pulling the MS off the wall.

 

I'll look around for the two commands that are used for sleep management. They are not in my very old out dated Insteon command reference.

 

EDIT: actually the sleep management commands are not necessary if the commands to the MS are done quickly. So long as the MS is receiving commands it will not sleep. The sleep management commands eliminates the problem if the system is held up sending commands for some reason.

[ELA]

Thank you much LeeG,

I hope to experiment with this when I have time. As it is now I use hardware jumper config in my MS's. If I could easily update the configuration without having to access the PIRs I would then use the firmware configurations option.

 

 

Thank you UDI for making my PLM restore so easy in terms of automating the process. Very gracefully handled!

Quite the test of ones communications reliability I imagine in some cases. I located one low battery when restore to that device failed.

 

It was as big of a trouble as I suspected up and down the ladder though for the RF devices.

 

It would be a very nice feature to be able to update the PIRs via a motion activation if it could be added at some point in the future?

[Michel Kohanim]

Hello ELA,

 

Thanks so very much for the update and our pleasure!

 

We have gone back and forth on the motion activation and then programming. We finally decided against it since in more than 50% of the cases, it caused much more problems and especially corrupted links.

 

With kind regards,

Michel