When a change happens on an Insteon device outside of HA, it does not update in HA. Also, the thermostat won’t update in HA, even when changed in HA (although it updates the device). I have noticed that whenever HA restarts and the integration restarts, everything updates then. Back when the Insteon app was still functional, manually loading that also forced the hub to send it’s states back to HA. What I am hoping to do, is find out what call was being sent from the Hub when the app was loaded, that forced this, as I would love to set an automation to just make this one call regularly or even integrate some sort of scene that on a button press, sends that message.
I am yet to find a suitable solution. Right now, I have an automation to just restart Home Assistant every hour, to at least get the current state at that time.
I was hoping @teharris1 might be able to point me in the right direction if there is already a function to do this, that I am missing, or if there are any API calls, etc I could be looking at.
HA does not poll. It listens for changes in the device to update the state of the device in HA. The only exception to this is on startup when HA actively polls each device for its current state. This is different than the Insteon App which polled the device every time a user opened the app and when to the device screen.
The way HA is able to hear all of the device state changes is using the links in the ALDB. Thermostats are a particularly difficult beast however and can be flakey. The best way to make sure each device is setup correctly is to navigate to the Insteon panel, select the device, click the All-Link Database tab and press the “Add Default Links” button. This will setup the links between the modem and the device so that the modem can hear all of the traffic.
Re-adding the default links to each device, in addition to adding an automation that runs every couple minutes which updates the entities seems to be the secret sauce. Running stable for the last couple days.
Originally, I tried just the Add Default Links, but it seemed that the thermostat stopped checking in after a few hours, adding the automation seems to have corrected that.
@teharris1 I have the same problem as @veinoffeeling is describing. The HA interface is not accurately reflecting the state of all of my devices even though all the default links are present. I never had this problem with the Insteon app, which to me also means all the default links are present. I have HA running on a dedicated brand new Pi which is always on and therefore should always be getting updates from the Hub when there are state changes. Are there any further troubleshooting tips, logs or traces that can be performed? While @veinoffeeling provides a workaround, I’m not keen on simply repolling the hub every few minutes just to get device status. Seems like a lot of unnecessary noise and overhead.
The insteon app did poll the devices each time you opened the app. So the fact that the old app worked does not indicate that the default links are there.
I’ve been wondering if there is a way in HA to have the hub poll all devices just like the Insteon app does at startup? I have tried @ [veinoffeeling] idea from above, and it doesn’t actually poll any devices.
Figured I would post here. I just got an Insteon integration and I can control my insteon devices from HA. But button puhses on the devices do not refresh in the HA dashboard. Any new thoughts on this?
I actually just tried resetting the keypad and it’s working now. But while I’m here, anyone know how I can access things like Fast On/Off (there aren’t options for that in the automation GUI that I can see). And also, do I have the ability to adjust the Local On level on a switch? I did on my old ISY. I have to imagine HA has that ability, too.
@teharris1
Hi and must be a lot of work to integrate Insteon. Great Work! Relatively NEW to HA so … learning and may be using wrong wording here.
Migrating from HCA - solid Insteon support - but… EOL.
100+ Insteon modules , thru USB PLM
HUB was not reliable in HA.
Question relates to Status Update.
I added the Defaults links but it is not perfect. I would like to run a poling (like it does at statup) to refresh the current status of all devices. I tried the solutions (update entity) above from @veinoffeeling but nothing occurs.
1- Can we reproduce the initial poling at HA startup and refresh status?
2- Could we write python script to access the PLM from HA and send a status request?
3- Any other work anyone has done to improve the status update?
More info if useful.
1- before anything, the person who created and maintains this integration did an awesome work. thx 1M times.
2- As for the status not matching, in my case, it is mainly (and logical in context) related to the mini remotes and non-main buttons of 6/8 buttons switches. Status will go off. While possible, making automations in HA is not efficient to maintain.
This is why having a status update from the Insteon Integration. Automating it would make things simpler. Trigger, get all status updates, all in sink on the dashboards.
