Ouch!
Note to Self: Don’t buy that type of fan!
Obvioulsly you are saying it is RF remote. I have seen issues reported for IR and not enough power to send the light beam unless perfectly pointed.
Most all mine are RF.
Yeah, it’s an older fan before I was into automation. It’s kind of funny because I had three imsteon switches and the eight button touchpad on my wall for several years.
And it took the company going out of business and me breaking out into a full-blown panic to find out what my options were
Couple days later I was like Home Assistant what’s that? It was right they added the whole integration
Never knew it would consume the next three years of my life lol every week configuring something new
On that note, I think I’ll look to see if and what type of ceiling fans are out there that are already smart and integrate directly with Home Assistant. Thanks for the help.
Well …
(Disclaimer: I know some folks from the company)
My Haiku is beautiful. And well made stuff.
FYI, I am totally willing to trade anyone all my 6 button switches (like 6 or 7 of them) for dimming paddles. With Home Assistant now …
- I never use the buttons on those
- I rarely use any switch, ever except for a few … I have wall tablets now
- My wife NEVER uses a switch, she has everything in scenes and Alexa and Home Assistant … handles her life perfect. “Alexa, turn on couch” … “Alexa, it’s bedtime” … “Alexa, open gate” , “Alexa, turn on dogs”.
Great news everyone! The most recent update of the Insteon Panel has been merged into the core. The features included in this change are:
- Delete devices
- Configure modem (PLM / Hub)
- Configure device overrides (still not a recommended option in most cases)
- Manage X10 devices
- Move the panel from the side panel and to the standard configuration path
Settings → Devices & Services → Insteon → Configure - Ability to access a specific device configuration from the HA device page. I.e. you can get to the Insteon properties / ALDB via:
Settings → Devices & Services → Devices Tab → Select Device → Visit (in device info box) - All panel actions are moved under the actions (three dots) menu in the upper right corner of the screen for design consistency with other HA screens
The move from the side panel to the Configure section was requested by the HA team to make this consistent with other integrations.
8 Likes
@teharris1 I can’t express enough my gratitude for all you’ve done with the Insteon integration. You are the reason I use HA today, as I was part of the great Insteon-to-HA migration when the Insteon servers went offline from the bankruptcy.
I’ve used a Hub 2 and now a USB PLM to connect to HA. The PLM responds much more quickly, and doesn’t seem to be as affected by situations when a spike in Insteon traffic leads to messages being dropped on the way to/from HA.
But I have a couple of issues with my Insteon devices that I’m hoping you or someone else here can help with.
Status often doesn’t change in HA if a wired device was changed in response to a Mini Remote (2342-2). The remotes are directly linked to the target devices (dimmer outlet, ApplianceLinc, FanLinc). I’ve noticed that sometimes HA will see the button signal from the remote, but inconsistently. It’s never consistent; it’ll work for a while and then stop working for a while.
Also, I have two 2476S relay switches. They do not correctly work with ALDB read/write. They are linked to the PLM, correctly report state, and respond to on/off commands from HA. But when I try to load the ALDB, it shows one entry and stops, reporting that the ALDB is partially loaded. This behavior occurs with both 2476S switches. Ideas on why this may be happening?
@poppaduck Thanks for the kind words. Happy to help. I am going to IM you to debug your issue
I would like to add my voice of deep appreciation and thank you for all the work you do to maintain and innovate the Insteon integration. It is a lifesaver for me.
Question, I think I recall the integration used to auto detect new devices. I added a new plug in module to the hub using the older Insteon app on my phone. Works fine. That was about an hour ago, I have rebooted HA but still has not identified presence of new device. Perhaps I am mistaken. What am I missing?
I’ve seen this happen before. Most of the time they show up just fine, but occasionally they don’t.
As a rule, I’ve had more consistent results when using the HA interface to link devices to the hub. It doesn’t hurt anything to relink via HA.
@rfmcmanus, yes, it should recognize a deviced added using the Hub app or using the set buttons on the Hub and the device. I will test that to see if something broke. In the meantime, there is no harm in re-adding the device using the HA UI.
I just heard from the head of development at Insteon. They are releasing a new firmware version for the Hub and they think they have found some improvements in the Hub connectivity issues.
Please use this thread if you have Hub connectivity issues:
HA looses connection with Insteon Hub 2 - Configuration - Home Assistant Community (home-assistant.io)
They are looking for beta testers for the new firmware.
1 Like
Hi! I’m a new refugee from Indigo, learning HA.
First of all, @teharris1 thank you for all your hard work!!! This has clearly been a big effort and it looks really good. Do you have a patreon? I’d love to be able to support it.
I’m starting to add devices, by typing in their addresses because I got a new PLM to use with HA. And I hit a question… is there a way to show Insteon addresses in a column of the table of the Insteon devices table? The addresses get added to the name of each device, but I don’t want to keep them as part of the name because I want to be able to use the device name in “friendly” UIs. I assume the integration stores them separately somehow so I was hoping I could just “show the ‘address’ column”, but I can’t find any way to reveal it, which made me wonder if there’s an important HA concept that I should wrap my head around. By default I’m assuming that HA is kind of like Indigo but I’m sure there are differences.
What I have done is to keep the entity_id the same and just edit the friendly name.
(this screen is rendered by HA and I don’t believe the integration can control what is displayed here)
Alternatively, if you select CONFIGURE on the integration’s config entry…
you can see the addresses there:
Thanks Daniel! That’s confusing that there are two different lists of devices, but okay, I kind of get it.
Stupid question - where can I find out more information on how to add this to HA?
ahh, nevermind - I thought this was something on top of the HA integration…
While I’m here - does anyone have a Smartenit EZIO8SA working? I was able to add mine, but I do not see any entities for the various INs and OUTs.
thanks in advance!
No worries! It used to be, 2 or 3 years ago but it’s all inside the HA Core integration now!
1 Like
@teharris1 Thank you so much for your fantastic work on the Insteon integration! Despite the KPL limitations you mentioned in the Add Support for 6-Button Keypad Dimmer (2334-292) · Issue #3 · nugget/python-insteonplm · GitHub , KeypadLinc Dimmer physically is an excellent device compared to e.g. Zooz Zen32 which is non-dimmable for the connected load and whose big button eventually sticks. The larger of my Insteon installations is 16 devices, including 7 of these keypads - which all respond just fine thanks to your work.
Is there a plan to add a dashboard card that displays a 6/8 button KPL dimmer? I get individual buttons as switch entities which, by combining the sections view (grid) and grid card with 6 or 8 button cards, can be made to look sort of like the keypad. However for multiple keypads that’s a whole lot of fragile, redundant, inelegant copy-paste - something we’ll do well to minimize if HA is to mature.
Semantically, to me, just like a thermostat card displays and controls multiple entities of one physical & logical device in a single card, so too ought the KPL dimmer card. Although I’m tempted to say HA ought to have a “generic decora-sized wall keypad” down the line, there’s such an abyss in design & functionality between Insteon KPL, Zooz Zen32, and Lutron HomeWorks seeTouch / QS / RadioRA keypads that attempting a system-agnostic keypad card would likely add complexity not reduce it, in my opinion.
Why have dashboard keypads at all that match the physical devices? Because:
- Compact;
- Encourages “smart home” as opposed to “dumb home” (where just one person can make sense of the durn thing and the rest of the family are hostages)
- Carries over any design work already invested in creating a sensible wall keypad control experience, into a dashboard the same family members can use intuitively.
Pushing any of the non-dimmer buttons on the card would by default just fire off the button push event for the actual keypad button - so the physical keypad is the one that maintains the state according to whatever radio-button/group or other setup the KPL has.
Would very much appreciate your thoughts.
Alex
New to Home Assistant - Insteon Migration Questions:
Greetings Home Assistant, Insteon community!
I have a smart home that is heavily Insteon integrated / dependent. I currently use a Universal Devices 944i to program the Inston device links & scenes, as well as control automations. UD has decided to force an upgrade, which, has brought me to search for better migration candidate (ie retire UD and let HA run the entire universe of things).
I have to date added Inston devices, and started to replicate scenes (Insteon Scenes & Home Assistant Scenes). I have already figured out that to replicate a scene triggered by HA, I can use the GUI to create it but to get it to do exactly what I want, I need to manually edit the ‘/homeassistant/scenes.yaml’. ‘/homeassistant/insteon_devices.json’ seems to hold all the device linking tables . . . & this is where I started to have questions / reservations ext. After a considerable amount of searching & reading, I figured . . . just ask. So, here it goes:
- Can HA, program Insteon Devices (links / Scenes) as I add more devices (with % On levels, ramp rates, ext)?
- Is there a ‘best practice’ for creating Insteon Scenes (with % On levels) so the Inston devices and HA truly integrate
- Is there detailed under the hood documentation out there (for Insteon)?
Hoping this is a n00b question and not the rabbit hole that I think I’m looking at.