Insteon Hub Conversion to Home Assistant

Configuration
1

Hello All,
I am in way over my head! I am one of the unfortunate souls who invested way too much into insteon only to be left high and dry by them. My hub went offline last week and doesn’t seem to be coming back anytime soon. I have read that many users are experiencing this issue and insteon has completely shut down customer support which is maddening! Anyway all my switches still work so I hate to replace them but without the insteon hub services I can no longer use alexa voice commands to control switches or scenes.

I have read that Home Assistant is a good work around for this issue which I am highly interested in but I am completely lost. I would consider myself tech savvy but I am definitely not a coder. I am trying to read about this process but get lost right off the bat because I dont understand many of the acronyms, or hardware being used.

I guess my question is, is there a very layman’s terms and simple instruction guide on how to make this conversion? I tried going through the “get started” link but I am not even familiar with raspberry pi 4 or the like, and I know this probably makes me sound like an idiot but I don’t know what a virtual machine is or how to dedicate resources on my laptop for the windows install. I need your help! I am even willing to pay for personal assistance if there is a service provided. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

2

I know this can seem overwhelming, and unfortunately There is no simple comprehensive guide. Home Assistant is very powerful, but definitely has a learning curve for new users. I think if you break things down one at a time it will make it easier.

Your first decision needs to be what equipment are you going to run Homeassistant on. However, as the old saying goes, between the options of “cheap, fast, and easy”, you can only choose two. Home Assistant is local and fast- so you have cheap or easy now. You already have a Windows machine, but starting off that way is not the easiest, as you will need to configure a VM, and will likely run into other complications that Windows throws at you around network settings, firewalls, etc (most people using Home Assistant and in IT in general HATE windows). If you have an old laptop or computer lying around, you can install Linux on it and use that, but if you have no experience with Linux that will be painful to learn as well, but worth it in the end.

Home Assistant in its easiest to setup and use form is meant to run as an appliance on a Raspberry PI. You likely can purchase a Raspberry pi for far less then it would cost to replace all your insteon devices and start all over with something else. Here is a video to help choose your hardware.

Next you have to select your install type. Based on your post, I would not recomend container, supervised, or core as they are far too complicated for a new user. You will want the full homeassistant “hassio” which includes the operating system nd addons. That will either run directly on the Raspberry PI or in a VM on another machine (depends on your hardware). Here is another video on install types. I would recommend any of his videos from “Everything Smarthome” to learn more about Home Assistant actually.

Once you have Home-assistant running and setup properly, next you will want to add the Insteon integration. Documentation on that is here

From there, if you want to access Home Assistant from outside your house, or use Alexa and Google to control Home Assistant and Insteon devices, you will have to configure secure external access. The easiest way to do that is Home Assistant cloud aka Nabu Casa. It costs $6.50 a month. Running cloud servers necessary for external access and Amazon skills isn’t free, which is why many “free” services like Insteon, Wink, and Iris eventually fail. There are ways you can configure external access for free, but they are anything but easy. There is a free 30 day trial to test it out.

I would never recommend this route. Most don’t want to offer this service as it is very difficult to configure things remotely. Also, what do you do when there are updates or you need to make changes in the future? You will be far better off taking the time to learn how to do it in your own.

3 Likes
3

I wouldn’t quite put it that way. I’m sure there are people who would be willing to do that, but it’s definitely a hassle so the rate is probably going to be more than many people are willing to pay. I’m a IT and network engineer and am pretty confident I could work with someone remotely to transition to Home Assistant but it would be something like $100/hour or fraction thereof and things are slow remotely providing assistance so I would expect it to take several hours depending on the complexity of the situation. In other words it could easily run $800-$1000.

Now, if someone has a big enough Insteon system and really wants to keep it going or can mostly figure things out themselves and thus keep costs a bit lower it may make sense but probably that’s a small percentage of people.

4

Hiring someone has been discussed on many threads

To clarify, professional instalation definitely has a market and many who do it, but I would think any professional installer would generally not install an open source system like home assistant. One breaking change the user doesn’t know how to update will send the whole thing crashing down. Plus they would want to sell you the equipment and support as a full commercial system.

5

You may want to look at a different smart home system such as Hubitat because I feel you won’t be ready to deal with Home Assistant’s fairly steep learning curve based on how you describe your current tech know-how. With Home Assistant, there is a ton of trial and error to work through in the beginning. Documentation can be sparse and/or really frustrating since it was written for those who are already familiar with the workings of Home Assistant but not so much the guy/gal just getting started.

I came from Hubitat to Home Assistant four months ago in search of more powerful features and choice of hardware which I couldn’t get with Hubitat. However, it has been a huge uphill battle getting to where I’m at today. Not only having to learn so many new things, but the time I’ve spent learning such things has also been immense.

While I can’t see myself going back to Hubitat today, Hubitat is still leaps and bounds easier for a novice or intermediate user to understand and it has many powerful features such as Rule Machine, Google Home + Alexa integration, built-in security system etc. all on a locally administered platform meaning you’re not reliant on a company or service for your smart home to work. Home Assistant is very similar btw. If you’re willing to stick it out with Home Assistant you will ultimately be better off I feel, but it’s not for everyone so user beware.

6

Jason,

You and I are in exactly the same situation. I have ordered a Raspberry Pi 4 which comes on Monday. In the meantime I tried setting up a VM on my Window 10 Pro Laptop and downloading the Hyper-V Home Assistant server software. It seemed to load the Home Assistant Server, but I had trouble then getting on Home Assistant.

Then I found a download on GitHub called HAASSWP.zip (you should be able to find it by doing an internet search for Home Assistant for Windows). It took awhile to load, but it worked! I can now access my Insteon Hub and the devices that are attached to the Hub. I still have not been able to access the scenes and the schedules on the hub. It may be that the Insteon integration on the HaasWP image it not the most recent, so I am trying to figure out that as a next step.

I also have not yet been able to locate the Alexa integration.

Good luck. I will keep you posted on my progress.

1 Like
7

I was able to get a Raspberry Pi 4 up and running with Home Assistant and control my Insteon lights.

There was some suggestion that doing a factory reset on the hub causes it to never work again. I did network reset on my hub after the Insteon servers went down and I was able to access my hub with the login and password on the bottom of the hub.

I noticed that all my prior Insteon programming still works. I just can’t change it. I have read that in a week or two there will be a new control panel that will control the hub just like the app from Home Assistant.

I tried to set up a schedule to control some lights in Home Assistant, but haven’t gotten that to work yet. I suspect I’ll figure it out eventually.

I am also able to access Home Assistant remotely to control things, but only in a browser from a computer. I’m thinking it might not be that hard to write an smartphone app to control things, but I haven’t gone too far down that route.

If anyone needs some help setting up a Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant I can probably help – at least give some advice on setting up a Raspberry Pi with remote access and flashing a SDCard with everything setup.

1 Like
8

There is a Home Assistant mobile app that will communicate to your home assistant if it is properly configured for external access (which it should be if you can see it in an externalbrowser). The Instructions and link to to download on either ios or android is below.

9

Hey John. I’m in the same boat with a full Insteon home system… probably 30+ units. I’ve built a raspberry PI and have it hardwired to my network. Home Assistant has been successfully installed and most of my other home devices like Sonos, Apple TV, HUE etc have been found. I’ve configured the Insteon integration, found my insteon HUB IP address, and whildin with the username and password under the hub. Everything seems fine but it’s not discovering any of my insteon devices… just the hub… have any suggestions? Thanks in advance… Paul

1 Like
10

Did you ever figure out how to get the scenes and schedules to work? I’m still working from a VM while testing and I can see the devices, but not the scenes or schedules.

11

Hi Jason, I’m in the same boat with Insteon devices. In fact, I stumbled upon HA a few weeks ago when I was looking for an integration solution that would allow me to run and synchronize my Sengled lights and Bond devices with the Insteon Keypad. So when Insteon went dark I had already a working installation of HAOS on a windows laptop but hadn’t yet invested any time to play with the integration.

Based on my experience and programming level, the easiest way to get up and running is to use a windows computer and create a virtual machine. For my installation, I chose to upgrade my Windows 10 from Home to Pro edition and installed using Hyper-V software. Hyper-V doesn’t support USB but this wasn’t an issue for Insteon Hub. Once you are running HAOS on the virtual machine the Insteon integration process is straight forward. You will need the IP address for the hub and the local username and password for your hub. Once configured, HAOS will automatically detect all of your devices. Unfortunately the devices are listed by their IDs so if you don’t already have a list of device ids and location then you need to manually identify and name them in the app.

HAOS is a local installation; if you want to integrate it with Alexa/Google or access remotely then you should sign-up for Nabu Casa subscription and enable the HA skill for Alexa.

I plan to reinstall HAOS this afternoon on a new windows 10pro machine that I bought online for $200. The laptop I have been using was good to test but now I want a small box that I can store in my cabinet with my other network devices. Happy to take some step by step setup notes and share back with you if you’d like.

Also, I looked into other systems and HAOS seems to be the most advanced and has the best community support. There is no upfront cost to try Home Assistant if you have the existing windows hardware.

12

I got it working on VM but Alexa integration requires cloud service. You can sign-up for a trial with Nabu Casa.

13

Hi curious on the controls for old schedules in the hub. Got most of my Insteon stuff up an running really quick on a windows VM. Fortunately I had a Hype V server running so adding a new VM was quick and easy.

Very impressed how quickly I could get some basic schedules in place.

Problem is that I still see my lights going on based on old schedules. Wondering best way to eliminate those. Hoping what you referred too will help with that… Just started looking for a fixes…

14

Have you been able to access your insteon scenes and schedules? Also, the insteon switches appear as ID numbers and not as the names they were assigned. Do you know how to figureout which ID goes to which room? Thank you

15

I believe the ID numbers are printed on each of the devices. I went around and entered them in a spreadsheet with name and address. Then could quickly clean up the items in Home Assistant.

Still waiting on deleting/disabling the old scenes/schedules from the hub.

16

Tim or someone:

Looking for help converting Insteon to HA. I am now about 8 hours into flashing my new Raspberry Pi 4 (keyboard version) with the 32 bit operating version using Balena Etcher from

https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/7.6/haos_rpi4-64-7.6.img.xz

(A query of the Raspberry OS showed ARM7, which i am pretty sure is 32 bit)

I am stuck when i try to access my insteon HUB, which is clearly v2. I have the correct IP adress, and the only things hard wired into the router are the hub, the raspberry, and my laptop.

Have no idea why repeated attempts are not recognized, Pings to the presumed hub IP address show normal reponse times. All help appreciated

Thanks in advance!
Robert

17

other info on my setup: (sorry, new user has to be one per post)

18

oops…good advice from Rich to delete access info;;posting here hoping you see this, RIch.

yes, using the IP address of the Insteon hub, i DO get the dialog box for UN/PW, but it returns an error using the info from the hub label. I have even tried substituting 0 for Capital O, | and 1 for I, all to no avail My UN/PW for the Insteon app does not work either. I keep getting back to this dialog:
:dialog loop,

Thanks for looking at this.

Robert
(and thanks for the security nudge. Although if someone wants to turn my pool robot on and off, i feel bad for them…:slight_smile:

19

First quick test is to open a web browser and connect to http://ipaddress:25105. If the hub is responding you’ll be prompted to enter a username and password. Enter the User and Password from the back of your hub. While you cannot control or use the hub directly this way, it should return some details about your hub. This will at least let you know if you have the basic connection details right,

Also, you may want to reconsider showing your IP, username and password on the forum.

20

Also hoping to find out how to access my current scenes/automations in HA. When I imported everything into HA, my lights are still coming on at sunset and going off at sunrise, but where in HA can I find these settings/configurations? I assume they are still in the hub? Is there a way to re-create them in HA so I can add/delete/modify in the future? Thanks in advance for any help!