Insteon USB PLM with Home Assistant OS

Configuration
21

The only devices I could not get to work with the usb plm were the motion sensors, Gen 1 and gen 2

I have 20 + other devices made up of switches, outlets, 6 button, 8 button, mini switches, outdoor outlets, etc

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Have you cycled these devices?? I am redoing my Virtual Machine. and I will watch how the insteon reacts

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Although I can see all my devices that used to talk to my 2413U in the All Linking Database, I don’t seem to be able to control the devices. I manually added one as a controller and receiver, which worked. But I’ve tried it with others and it doesn’t help.

It doesn’t make any sense I would have to re-add them to the PLM, but I can’t think of any other way to add this.

Has anyone else had trouble migrating a PLM to HA?

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What do you mean you can “see”. I have found the home assistant integration does a pretty good job of auto discovery and those devices (one I figure out which they are) are controllable. even my ancient and cranky thermostat adapter. I have found the insteon integration far superior to z-wave and the many dead devices it creates

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25

Every Insteon Device I have works just perfect. Devices, dimmers, multi-buttons, thermostats … 80+ things. Maybe the issues are n wiping the PLM or?

26

@gokuro Did you ever get your USB PLM working? I am having similar issues.

I switched from using the Insteon hub to the USB PLM due to the hub constantly locking up. I had to factory reset my USB PLM, it had a red LED status light on the side and it would not add to Home Assistant. Once I added it, all my devices showed up, which was strange because most were not paired with this PLM. I’m wondering if HA somehow maintained these devices from where I was using the hub previously, and even though I deleted the Insteon integration and rebooted HA, they stuck around somehow.

Unfortunately I cannot control any of the devices. So I tried manually relinking them by initiating the link process via the HA Insteon add device button, but nothing ever happens, even when I use the manual set button my my devices. I have tried to load the all links database for the PLM, but nothing ever shows.

I’m running a Rasberry Pi 3 (if I recall B+) in 32-bit. IDK that this would have any impact.

Is there a way to enable more detailed debugging for the Insteon integration? Doesn’t it just use the pyinsteon Python module? I have another Pi I have Raspberian on I am thinking of connecting the PLM to and seeing if I can get pyinsteon to communicate with it.

Thanks for any update on your issues!

PS: I turned on debugging via the HA integration. I noticed I witnessed this event in the log. Is it possible my PLM is dead? It linked the first time after the factory reset. The PLM is about 2 years old, I had not used it until now but it has been connected to power and to my HA RPi as I waited for time to finally try to get off the old hub that wasn’t working well.

2023-03-04 23:19:03.465 ERROR (MainThread) [pyinsteon.managers.aldb_read_manager] Device refused the ALDB Read command with error: direct_nak_aldb (0xff)

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2023-03-04 23:19:03.465 ERROR (MainThread) [pyinsteon.managers.aldb_read_manager] Device refused the ALDB Read command with error: direct_nak_aldb (0xff) says your modem is working. The issue is the device is not linked to the modem.

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Thanks I think there were two things confusing me. First, I had to remove insteon_devices.json after I removed the Insteon integration, then restart HA (to get rid of devices from my old hub integration). I also factory reset my PLM (starting out the status light was red, so pretty certain when I started this mess it was actually broken, but that was before I got the ALDB message). Then add the Insteon integration back, and that removed all my devices that were not attached to this new USB PLM. Maybe removing the JSON file wasn’t needed and I killed all that data for nothing, but the second part of my issues was I believe what I got hung up on.

The next part was the add device button doesn’t seem to work. I opened an issue on Github about this. There is some websockets error about invalid_format when inputting an insteon address into the field to link it. So the entire time, I thought the GUI might be trying to do something with the modem, but it was not. This is what confused me, since I was able to link devices remotely (without manually hitting the set button) by connecting the PLM to another RPi I have.

Thanks for your reply. I never could figure out the websockets issue. I saw other similar integrations having issues with similar messages. However, I couldn’t come to any conclusion if this was user (me) error, or if there may actually be something broken.

29

I can reproduce the websocket issue. I can get you a patch that will work today or you can wait for the patch to make it into the core system. Typically patches of this nature take 2 - 5 days to get into the core release. To make this work you would need to be able to:

  1. Enter changes directly into your configuration.yaml file in the config directory
  2. Use the command git pull to download the needed code patch
  3. Restart HA
30

I have made the change required to address this issue. If you want to try it out, please do the following:

  1. Set up SSH to your system. The easiest way is to install the “Terminal” add-on. (only available if using HassOS)
  2. Open the SSH terminal and change directory to the config directory cd config
  3. Clone the insteon_frontend repository: git clone https://github.com/teharris1/insteon_frontend
  4. Open your configuration.yaml file and add the following lines:
insteon:
  dev_path: /config/insteon_frontend
  1. Restart HA

At this point you should be running the patched Insteon panel and the “add with address” option should work.