So believe it or not if you have too many devices and you poll from insteon frequently enough the hub will lock you out to send command. You need to restart your HA to have everything go back to normal. Over few hrs throughout the day my insteon simply quits unless I restart HA. I tested this theory on Openhab which lets you adjust the poll time and long be hold I was right.
The insteon hub is not a very well designed device in my opinion. It requires the controller software (i.e. insteonplm python module) to poll it in order to catch messages and it only stores up to 4 prior messages before it overwrites the prior messages. Because of this you need to poll the Hub frequently to make sure you don’t miss messages. I can add an option to adjust the polling frequency but the risk is losing messages such as device state updates, especially when triggering automations or scenes.
Just curious. how many devices do you have and what did you set the polling frequency to in OpenHAB?
Hello Teharris sorry for late response, It has been a hectic past month for me here. I have about 40 devices. OpenHap has to setting for poll one I think is for getting the status of the devices which for me works fine at 2 min. This is useful when someone manually turn on the switch and you want to get have on update on the software end. Apparently if one poll this too frequently they can overload the hub and it needs to be rebooted to work correctly again. The other polling which I don’t understand it well is set at much shorter time less than a second and that doesn’t overload the hub no matter how short you set it but they recommend not to set it shorter than half a second. Mine is at 0.7S at it seems to work fine.
Thanks for the response. So there are a couple of differences here with HA.
- HA does not do the first polling you refer to at all. What HA does is listen for the change on the device side to reflect that change in HA. It is a standard part of Insteon to allow this. I am surprised to hear that OpenHab feels the need to do this type of polling at all.
- The hub already does it’s own polling (which also surprises me but the more I learn about the hub design, I suppose nothing should surprise me). The hub polling is based on listening to devices. When a device notifies the network of a change it polls all other devices to see if they responded to the change. My newest design listens for these polling activities and can update device states based on the Hub’s own polling so no need for the polling you describe that OpenHab does.
- The reason the hub does it’s own polling is because it does not try to learn the devices All-Link database. My newest design does use the ALDB to figure out what devices are listening to other devices and will identify changes based on ALDB triggers. (This is not a new concept, other Insteon libraries have done this including the ISY and some others so I am playing catch up in this area but hey, at least I got there.)
- The second type of polling you mention is the polling required for any library that wants to listen to changes that the Hub broadcasts including confirmation that commands send to devices were received… My library is set to 0.5 seconds but 0.7 is OK too. The challenge with this is you have to be careful not to make it too short or the hub freezes but if you make it too long you miss messages because the hub only keeps 4 to 8 messages in memory and after that, you cannot see them with polling. So you have to poll very frequently to make sure you see all of the messages that the hub broadcasts. (Terrible design by the way).
I mentioned my newest design. You appear to be pretty tech saave so if you want to download it I can give you the links. It is beta right now but I am looking for testers, especially Hub testers.
Hello Teharris. Thank you so much for your detailed response, and dedication toward Insteon. I would be more than happy to test it. I have about 30 devices and they are mainly I/O links, Dimmers, Light Switches and leak sensors. I also heavily dependent on the Insteon scenes and their status. As creating HA scenes for Insteon devices has “pop corn” effect. Insteon scenes are rather synchronous (to my experience it is the only automation platform which scenes work so well). Anyways I am all in, I would test it and report back.
Have a look at this post and let me know if you have questions about how to install. I can work with any version of HA.
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Hello Teharris Sorry I was busy with work I am going to install this today and I will let you know next week about the result
Hi, I have an issue with insteon thermostats no refreshing in the HA dashboards. I believe there is a polling issue. Thank you !
Insteon does not poll. It listens for changes. What version are you on?
I am in version core-2022.4.7
The problem is with the thermostats which probably do not transmit the state changes…
Tomorrow 2022.5 is coming out. Upgrade to that and you will get a new link on the side bar called “Insteon”. This will bring you to the list of Insteon devices. Select the thermostat and click on the tab at the top called “All-Link Database”. You will then see a button that says “Add Default Links”. This will setup communication between your modem and your thermostat so that HA sees info coming form your thermostat correctly.
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