Insteon Refugee: Success with Homeassistant, emulated_hue, and Alexa

Configuration
1

I was left high and dry with the Insteon shutdown, but HomeAssistant has saved me.

I dusted off an old, unused Pine64 and loded it up with Armbian. Instead of installing the Home Assistant Operating System or the Container install, I went ahead and used the Raspberry Pi instructions to install Home Assistant Core, and it worked! (Though I need to update the outdated Python).

I used emulated_hue to get Alexa working, setting the listen_port to 80 as described in the Alexa instructions. It failed until I allowed Python permissions to bind to that port.

sudo setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /usr/bin/python3.8'

Now it works! Alexa discovers the emulated_hue and added devices, but also a lot of duplicates.

My questions:

How do I limit the devices to only the Insteon Hub attached devices? Or do i just need to manually name all of them?

How do I make the red light on the Insteon Hub green? Ideally as an indicator that it is talking to Homeassistant.

I hope to write up an Insteon refugee how-to soon.

2

Unless there is an easier way to make a group, I just manually added and tediously the specific Insteon switches I cared about.

Here’s my config for posterity. I had exposed everything by default which was too noisy, so I lmited just to the 7 devices I care about.

emulated_hue:
  listen_port: 80
  expose_by_default: false
  exposed_domains:
   -  light
   -  switch
  entities:
    light.switchlinc_dimmer_53_dd_60:
      hidden: false
    light.switchlinc_dimmer_53_ef_c2:
      hidden: false
    light.switchlinc_dimmer_53_ef_6c:
      hidden: false
    light.switchlinc_dimmer_53_df_8e:
      hidden: false
    light.switchlinc_dimmer_53_ef_40:
      hidden: false
    light.switchlinc_dimmer_53_e7_25:
      hidden: false
    switch.keypadlinc_on_off_17_a2_f7_main:
      hidden: false

I tested the visibility of devices at http://x.x.x.x/api/v2/lights

I also set the Pine64 to use a static IP address to prevent it moving around and confusing anyone.

Now, I just need to get the red light on the Insteon Gateway to turn green.