Proper escalation for Insteon bugs?

[Ross S]

I found a bug[1] with my KPL and called the Insteon Gold support line, hoping it might have been fixed in a later firmware release or at least that I'd be able to report the issue so it could be considered for a future release. The tech on the phone hadn't seen this problem before and went to try and reproduce the issue. He was able to, but that just confirmed to him that my KPL was working as intended and not defective. He seemed to agree that it was an issue, but since it he could reproduce it, that must just be the way it worked.

 

He said had no access to the Insteon engineers and no way of opening a bug with them. This is admittedly not a major bug, but it's still a bug and I'm confused that there doesn't appear to be a way to get this feedback to the engineers for consideration. I didn't see any other way that I, as a consumer, can get in touch with Insteon folks besides the Gold support line. How are problems from end users supposed to be escalated to the people who can fix them?

 

[1] Here's the bug: Say a RemoteLinc 1 or 2 is linked to the local load of a KPL with a high ramp rate and you turn the KPL on or off via this link. While the light is slowly fading up or down, if you press any of the scene buttons on the KPL, the fade instantly jumps to its end state (on or off) even if the scene buttons aren't linked to anything. This doesn't happen if you activate the fade directly on the KPL instead of RemoteLinc via the main on/off buttons and a locally set ramp rate.

[LeeG]

That is the way of Insteon, no good way to provide feedback to the manufacturer/developer of most Insteon products. That is one of things that makes the ISY and UDI so outstanding, how they support their products.

 

Not sure it makes a difference but all the KPL buttons have Scenes associated with them. The ISY has to create a Scene between each KPL button and the ISY PLM so that the ISY is notified when a KPL button is pressed. What is effectively starting a new Scene when a button is pressed may terminate the action of the previous slow ramp up Scene initiated by the RemoteLinc button. The KPL has two choices, stop the ramp up where it is which leaves the KPL somewhere it was not told to go, or go the final On Level immediately. None of the Insteon devices can handle more than a single Scene at once.

[Ross S]

Thanks, LeeG. It's disappointing to know there isn't a better way to report this, but perhaps my expectations were too high. Regardless, I agree about UDI. In my limited interactions with them, they've been very responsive to issues I've raised.

 

I think there's something beyond what you mention going on with the KPL. It doesn't make sense to me that the problem only happens when the ramp up or down is initiated via remotelinc and not when initiated via the local on/off button. In both cases, when a scene button is then pressed, the KPL has to handle a new scene, send out various insteon messages, etc. This even happens after a factory reset when the KPL scene buttons aren't linked to anything.

 

One of these days I'll pull the firmware off of my KPL and see if I can figure out the issue. If I'm really in search of something to do on a weekend, maybe I'll see if I can fix it. I was able to get the firmware off one of my LampLinc modules and had some fun disassembling the code, tracing through execution paths and seeing how it worked. I didn't get through all of it though, particularly the interrupt handler which is a bit trickier to decipher than the main execution loop. I figure I shouldn't move on to a more complicated module like the KPL until I have a better understanding of a simple one.