Hi All, I migrated from Homeseer to Home Assistant and brought my Insteon setup over with me. One of the buttons on one of my keypads was setup to turn all of the lights on and then off in a certain room. This included a lamp module that is now used for a different purpose. So I want to delete the controller link from the keypad button. I go into the Insteon integration, then settings, then click on the keypad device, then “All link database”. I see the link I want to delete and click on it. Then try to uncheck “in_use” but I’m not seeing a way to save this. When I uncheck it, nothing happens (no “save” option comes up) and my only choice is to click the “x” in the top right and that doesn’t save my change. The box is still checked the next time I open the link. I think I need to somehow get it to save that pending change then “write to device” but can’t get it to save the pending change and “write to device” is grayed out.
The Tip on the Insteon Integration page note that there is some non-intuitive behavior between the app and HA. I would suspect that what your are experiencing is an artifact of the behavior.
Have you considered factory resetting your Insteon devices and then bring a blank slate into Home Assistant? I have have experienced many challenges similar to yours with Insteon, with and without hub or ISY994i. I have found that factory resetting almost always allows me to configure the Insteon devices the way that I want them.
Yes, it is painful to reconfigure all of your devices, but if you plan your migration well, it will go pretty quickly. I speak from my recent experience migrating from an ISY994i. The auto-discover worked pretty well for me, but I had annoyances similar to yours.
I used Universal Devices in the past. They are the King of Insteon and there is a Universal Devices Integration that some use to control Insteon in HA.
Just an alternative.
as @OldSurferDude mentions, there are some quiriks in the interface, but my experience is that it mostly works.
it sounds like you are on the right path with unchecking “in_use”. … then after making one or more add/detete/edit’s to links, you have to click on the three-dots menu at the top right and select “write to device” to actually commit the changes. also the UI is a bit janky for me in that each time you make any change/delete to a link the interface switches you from the “all-link database” tab to the “properties” tab, so you have to keep navigating back to the links tab.
for most of my devices, i have switched to just installing the default links that connect the device to the PLM and then i put triggers in HomeAssistant.
advantages: things are much more flexible and easier to tweak and configure, generally more compatible working with mixed-device population (insteon/non-insteon), no need to have to manually touch devices/push buttons (i.e., to wake wireless devices).
disadvantages: some increased latency, doesn’t provide true simultaneous control. a bit less direct control of details such as ramp-rate. lots of automations required just to do the tedious job of keeping things in-sync. i suggest finding a good blueprint to help with this - it will make things cleaner/easier than i find this approach suits my needs best in most cases, particularly as i find myself on a (slow) path towards a lower overall % of insteon devices in my system.
also for example, i’ve already migrated away from many old insteon wireless sensors to better modern alternatives (zigbee, z-wave, thread). i get superior appearance, reliability, battery life, and battery reporting, generally at low cost.
Thanks all for the responses. I did some surfing around to try to figure out what’s going on. I came across someone on the Github site that posted an issue related to updating insteon scenes that mentioned “hover the mouse…to find the invisible Okay button…”. Invisible Okay button???
So sure enough I went back into the All-Link Database, unchecked “in-use” and hovered my cursor around in the window and found two rectangular outlines near the bottom that showed up when you hovered over them, but were not visible otherwise and contained no text regardless of if you were hovering over them or not.
The one on the right (I have shown in my screenshot above) appears to be the “Okay” or “Save” one (I presume the one on the left is a “Cancel”??) because once I clicked on it, it kicked me out to the “Properties” tab (which incidentally is the issue that the person was highlighting in the Github post) then I had to click over to the All-Links Database tab again and sure enough, “write to device” was now an option. I clicked it and when the links came down again after the write, the link I wanted was no longer shown. Turning on “Show unused” showed the link there with “in use” as “no”.
Looking at some other issues in Github it seems others have noted these invisible buttons or inability to “save” or “okay” a change. It seems that maybe this integration is not being maintained anymore as the last closed issue looks to be from March 2023.
On a sad note, even though I was able to accomplish unchecking “is used” this doesn’t appear to have actually worked to “remove” the link because hitting the button on the keypad still operated the lamp module. But at least I got to the bottom of the inabilty to “save” changes in the integration. So hopefully someone will come across this post and can look for the invisible save button.
In the mean time I’ll keep looking for a way to edit links, maybe outside of this Insteon integration since it seems like it might not be something I can rely on going forward. Considering the potential of trying to migrate to an Insteon Hub and then maybe I can use the Insteon app to manage the links and Home Assistant will just read those changes from the Hub. Probably a whole host of other issues to work out in order to make that work.
