The US smart home company Insteon abruptly went dark and turned off its cloud. While Insteon products talk locally, the app and voice assistant integrations do not. Without this, users are not able to control and configure their hub and automations don’t run.
If you’re one of the impacted Insteon users, this post is for you.
The good news is that Home Assistant is able to talk to your Insteon devices via the Insteon hub or modem. You will be able to pair new devices and set up links as you’re used to.
The other good news is that Home Assistant works 100% local. There is no cloud necessary for any part of it to function and no one can remotely shut it down.
Once you have Home Assistant up and running, see the documentation for the Insteon integration on how to set it up. It works with the 2413U USB and 2412S RS242 flavors of PLM and the 2448A7 USB stick. It has also been tested to work with the 2242 and 2245 Hubs.
Tom Harris leads the development of the Insteon integration in Home Assistant and he is putting the final touches on a new Insteon page for the Home Assistant interface. This page makes it easier to manage your Insteon network, just like you would have done via the Insteon application. It’s expected to be available in 1-2 weeks.
Home Assistant is an open and friendly community which is happy to help new users. Join us on Discord chat or on our forums if you get stuck.
I didn’t expect them to go under, I was under the impression they were doing ok. Clearly, I was wrong. There must be a lot of installers out there pissed right now.
Good news! Question on the new interface: will it allow us to create scenes the way they execute in Insteon? I need to have my lights turn on simultaneously not serially and need to set different brightness levels
Someone needs to find all these dev docs on internet archive. Also someone needs to download and archive the House Linc software and drivers. I have the house linc drivers and software installed and I use it for diag all the time. Guess I’ll be moving to HA!
I have many of the pdf files for the various products and the installer for houselinc. I’ll pull them together over the coming weeks and post them here if anyone is interested.
Since I have 30+ Insteon devices, 3 hubs, and a modem, I suspect I’ll continue with my Insteon products till they all die.
Having installed the INsteon plugin for some time, I can say it is darn good and I am sure all of us will comment to make it much better.
But what we really need to to figure out hacking the proprietary communcation post hub/plm/usb to device. WIthout that, this is all “fluff” because those single point of failure devices will fail eventually. And when it does, not HA or anyone else is doing will help.
People should be pressuring SmartLabs to release the code so that we can build our own hub/plm/usb.
Lacking that, short term, having Insteon configurable in HA is great. But frankly that was rare and now even much more rare as no one is going to be adding new devices as they are also gone for the most part.
I am a software hack … so I don’t know squat really … but we need a hardware hack to build a new controllers (scanning/cracking the messages or getting them to tell us).
Any chance of finding away to read and update the Insteon scenes. I would love to be able to add or update the scenes I have and know what they control.
Out of the box can HA control (turn on/off) scenes the hub was a controller of? The Alexa skill could see and control them, but the discovery mode of HA doesn’t seem to identify them, so I don’t seem to be able to trigger them from HA. What am I missing?
So Ive got to say, HA has been a lifesaver for my Insteon wired home. And the fact it’s integrating with all my other smart crap is the icing on the cake.
However I’ve noticed that a lot of the time when I flip an Insteon device on/off with HA that sometimes it can take 10-20 seconds for the action to actually take place. Sometimes it’s instant.
I’m thinking maybe my Insteon hub is rebooting since it can’t find home base anymore maybe? And just wondering if anyone else has seen this issue yet?
I have seen comments that many professional installers were turning their Customer base away from Insteon for some time. Perhaps they could read the tea leaves better.
I wanted to get a sense an examples of people salvaging their Insteon Hubs/PLM’s. I have tried two versions of he Hub and a PLM with no success on any other home automation platform. I was considering looking into a Universal Devices ISY-994i and wanted to see if anyone has success there?
Long time ISY user. Very positive experience. Universal Devices makes a rock solid controller for insteon. I have HA talk to it rather than directly to Insteon devices. Set most of my lighting scheudles inside ISY. Worth also looking at their Polisy. It can essentially act as a controller and has integrations for lots of other stuff. Polisy is still early stages, ISY-994i is long standing rock solid.
I had an isy994 and a PLM originally. Personally i thought it was totally confusing. I went to Insteon Hub long ago. Then got into Home Assistant and never had any issues. Rarely do I add devices or change things and I am happy to do HA scenes.
Now with Insteon web issues, I moved to Nabu Casa which is not expensive and really, really great.
I rarely use a physical switch, I just tell Alexa now.
The biggest worry folks should have is not ISY or Home Assistant or Hubitat or whatever.
If your PLM or Hub dies, your out. Nothing in everything said above changes that. An ISY is not a Insteon PLM. Neither is HA. Nor is anything else.
I have a Raspberry Pi 4 set up and working with HA. I can ping the IP. No matter what I try I can’t add the Insteon integration to HA. It’s the latest Hub and I’ve tried the network reset-- press reset button 3 times fast and i get the 3 beeps but the Hub doesn’t seem to reboot, and the integration login always fails, even with the factory credentials. What’s the secret?
Overview of supported Insteon products
