I am one whose Insteon Hub V2 (2245-222) is showing a red light and am begining to plan to use Home Assistant (HA). There is a lot of HA documentation, and I am fortunate that I have a technically minded son who is about to set up a Pi for me to put HA on. If I have understood what I have read, once the Insteon package is on the Pi, HA will try to discover all the devices to which the Hub currently is connected. Once that step is done, all the Insteon devices will again be exposed to Google Home (GH) via the hub. Have I understood this part correcty?
If so, it seems as though I will again be able to configure schedules etc with GH.
Many thanks for clarifying whether I have understood correctly.
As an update …
I now have HA running on the Pi and it has discovered many of my Insteon devices. I have seen in the documentation that it may take additional attempts before all are discovered, and that maybe some of them require triggering to help. #1 Is Auto-Discover automatically on all the time? #2 Is the only way to connect a HA configuration to Google Home through Home Assistant Cloud?
The auto discovery info for the insteon integration is below.
Based on it, the discovery is automatically run at startup, but if a device isn’t found, it may require you to operate it manually. After manual operation, it should be found. If still not found, try linking/adding it again.
Home assistant cloud is the recommended and easy way to configure remote secure access, Alexa, and Google integration.
You can set it up manually on your own, but it is much more complicated. The directions are below, and the directions assume you’ve already securely setup external access on your own (with proper router port forwarding, ssl, and dns configurations).
If you haven’t setup secure access, see this first
Then this for google
Be sure you setup remote access properly or you open your network to security risks and hacking. Google will require secure https access to your machine, so simply port forwarding 8123 won’t do it. There is a link to a letsencrypt addon in the documentation linked above.
If you are willing to learn it could save you some money, and help get some more experience, but it might be good to use Home Assistant cloud to start until you are more comfortable with Homeassistant in general (it does have a free 30 day trial)
You can set up Nabu Casa subscription to support Home Assistant and get a simplified set up or you can do it on your own. There’s a series of videos on YouTube to set up HTTPS, DuckDNS and other whatever other steps are needed to get synchronization to Google up and running. It’s not easy but it’s doable with a little elbow grease and not dependent on a subscription.
Many thanks for the suggestions. I have decided that the voice activation is really the only ‘feature’ that Google Home integration would bring me. It was cute while it worked with the hub, but not necessary really.
So I have managed to get almost all of my Insteon devices set up in HA and much appreciate the sophistication and quality of what is incorporated in it.
That’s about right. You can integrate home assistant into Google to add things into Google that cannot be directly integrated there. It allows me to voice control things, but also for instance, I can cast my amcrest camera places. I can create a light group to turn off all the downstairs lights with a voice command. I’m sure there are other workarounds and tricks but it’s nice to have. The good thing is, while it’s a pain to set up, it’s well documented, there are YouTube tutorials, and it’s a one time thing. I haven’t had to revisit that whole process once.