I recently added my Insteon to HA and got it all up and running. The Insteon hub still has old scenes that are firing, how can I either edit or delete scenes from insteon hub? So I can creat in HA and not have them exist in two places.
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I saw a reddit thread where someone said they succeeded in blowing out the insteon schedule by unlinking then relinking the devices controlled by the schedule you are trying to delete. I posted about it here.
Haven’t heard a response for sure though if they succeeded or if it created any other potential issues.
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Is there a way to list all scenes and delete specific ones vs all?
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The latest version of Home Assistant now includes an insteon control panel.
I would try upgrading and see if that gives you the access to scenes you are looking for.
It does not I already tested it there. It honestly doesn’t really do anything other than group insteon devices into a view which doesn’t help since it shows the entity names instead of the labels so there’s no way to identify what’s what. That aside I tried toggling that same keypad button through the new interface and it doesn’t do anything either there.
Yes, unless I’m missing something, I don’t really see what value this new panel adds. One thing I was wondering is if I could re-assign buttons from a keypad to do other things.
The developer appears to be monitoring this linked thread. Any questions or suggestions about the panel might get a better response there.
So we are clear, there are two different items here:
- A scene is a preconfigured state of one or more devices that is activated when an Insteon modem (Hub or PLM) calls that scene. The device hears the scene get triggered and the device goes to the pre-configured state that the scene represent. The scene definition is stored in the device.
- A schedule is built into the Hub that triggers the scene based on whatever the Insteon app allowed you to setup, such as at sunset or at a specific time, etc.
The Insteon module in Home Assistant can help you to create and manage scenes including deleting them. However, the issue you have here is that SmartLabs did not expose the ability to manage schedules other than through the Insteon app.
So you have two choices:
- In each of the devices you can remove the Links that represent the scenes. Happy to walk you through that if you want. That would be done via the Insteon panel. The schedule will still be triggered in the hub but the devices will not respond to those triggers and so they will, in effect be deactivated.
- The other option is to factory reset your hub which will clear out all of the schedules. The scenes will still exist in the devices so when you relink the device to the hub you can still trigger the scenes using automation, Home Assistant scenes or script in Home Assistant.
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Ah, so at about 1:54 in your video from Oct, that ALDB view is something that has not been possible until now? Once I understand more about how to interpret that, I can see that would be very useful !
In choice 1 above, how does one identify THE link that represents a scene?
First, didn’t mean to offend I’m sure you worked hard on it. My comments come from the standpoint of an insteon user who is trying to understand the very different ux and assuming to find similarities to help make what were previously simple changes. Now it take hours for what were previously less then a minute of effort.
Having said that I have a specific insteon schedule that runs a scene though is saved to avoid 12 switches. So I guess two questions:
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can I and if how would I find that schedule and change it? Happens to be I altered it prior to insteon shutdown and would like to revert the a previous schedule. Basically instead of run Fri and Saturday run just Friday.
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What the process you offered to help with above to edit the scene by adding or removing switches?
Lastly, if I factory reset I’m concerned certain insteon buttons won’t work anymore as I’ve reported a separate issue here about this:
- can I and if how would I find that schedule and change it? Happens to be I altered it prior to insteon shutdown and would like to revert the a previous schedule. Basically instead of run Fri and Saturday run just Friday.
Per my comment above:
SmartLabs did not expose the ability to manage schedules other than through the Insteon app.
Therefore it is not possible for anybody to edit / manage a schedule that was built using the Insteon app.
To deactivate a scene using HA, navigate to the Insteon panel from the left menu. Click on the device you that is in the scene you want to deactivate. Click on the “All-Link Database” at the top of the page to see a list of all of the device links (scenes are technically links in the ALDB). Find the link that represents the scene in question. This can be a little tricky. A scene number is the “group” number. However, the Insteon app chose to make “scene 1” = group 25. (or 26 I cannot remember). The record will look something like this:
The Record ID does not matter but it must be “In Use”, the target must be your Hub, the group is the scene number and it must be a responder.
Click on that record and a dialog box will pop up. Change the group number to some other scene number not in use in your system today. When you are done press the “Write to device” button. Go to the other devices in the same scene and change their group numbers to the same new number. Now all of the devices are still in the same scene but not the scene number that the hub schedule knows. Now when the schedule is called to trigger scene X, none of the devices are in that scene. They are all now in scene Y.
To complete the process, inside the Insteon Panel, go to the Hub and open its All-Link database. (Please be on 2022.5.0, not beta for this). Find the corresponding controller link for each of the devices in the scene. These records will look as follows:
Again the record ID does not matter but it must be “In Use”, the target is the device, the group is the original scene number and it must be a controller. Click that record and change it to the new scene number. This step is important in order to ensure the scenes are triggered consistently, otherwise some devices may not react to the scene correctly.When you are done, press the “Write to device” button.
I am currently writing a post on how to trigger an Insteon scene from a Home Assistant scene. I will put a link to that post here when I am done.
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FYI, this was a false rumor. A factory reset hub can still be used in HA, you would just need to relink all of your devices to the Hub and recreate any scenes.
Here is the scenes post I was referring to above:
HOW TO: Trigger an Insteon Scene using Alexa or Google Assistant - Configuration - Home Assistant Community (home-assistant.io)
If what I’m trying to accomplish is to remove devices from any scenes in the hub (so they won’t be scheduled by the hub) and let home assistant do all control using automations, is it enough to just uncheck the “in use” box for each of the devices in the scene {group} that I want to disable and write it back to the hub and/or each affected device?
To be clear, I no longer want to use any of the scenes defined inside the hub.
And thank you for creating this new utility.
Yes that will also work. The method above is if you want to reuse the scenes in automation in Home Assistant.
Thanks. That works great. You’ve saved me from a factory reset and relinking everything. Much appreciated.
Thank you very much for steps to mange groups above!
Can you tell me what the data1, data2 and data3 fields in the Change ALDB Record do/mean? For example, One of my LampLinc Dimmer’s Change ALDB Record sheet reads in_use (checked), mode (Responder selected), group = 18, target = 44.75.28 (my insteon hub’s addr), data1 = 255, data2 = 31 and data3 = 0. Based on what you written above, I know what changing group will do. What affects will changing the various dataN parameters have?
For dimmable devices (Device Category 0x01) it is:
Data 1: On level of the button
Data 2: Ramp rate (in general use 28 but you can play with different values to see how the device behaves)
Data 3: Button number (For single button devices this will always be 1, for KeyPadLincs this can be up to the number of buttons)
For on/off devices (Device Category 0x02) it is the same except Data 2 is not used because the device does not ramp (they are not dimmers:)
Here is a post that describes this whole thing more:
Insteon control panel - Share your Projects! / Lovelace & Frontend - Home Assistant Community (home-assistant.io)
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Hi, thanks for outlining these steps in detail. You indicate “Change the group number to some other scene number not in use in your system today”…do you know what the valid range of scene numbers is? I have several scenes/schedules that I’d like to start “unscheduling” so can I put them into groups starting at say 500, 501, 502 etc ??
Valid scene numbers are 0 - 255.