Thanks, interesting read. I guess there’s no real news there, but this line jumped out at me:
In 2017, Smartlabs Inc. was acquired by Richmond Capital Partners, a private investment firm founded by Rob Lilleness, and Lilleness was installed as CEO.
This isn’t the first time a “private investment firm” has jumped in to pillage and destroy a company. We’ve all seen it happen before.
Makes me appreciate HA, local control and open source all the more!
Lol, yes I’ve ranted about Wink quite a bit over the years. That sure was a disaster.
But at least it was a slow death we kind of saw coming. This Insteon thing almost seems to have come out of nowhere, which I think makes it tougher. Although there were some warning signs in hindsight I suppose:
Its just the most recent example in a long line of shutdowns of cloud connected Smarthome tech though
The bottom line is you absolutely want local control - And Home Assistant is the way to go. Very glad I switched and am here.
I contacted aartech.ca Where I have usually bought all my Insteon over the years. They have write a few articles about the situation and all the available options. They have been left in the blind same thing as us…
If you have missed the Insteon update:
https://www.insteon.com/news2022
Dear Insteon Community,
In 2017, after many successful years, Smartlabs, Inc found itself in financial difficulties and the path forward was unclear. That year, Smartlabs took in additional capital and brought in new management to turn the situation around. These efforts resulted in new investment into the fortification of the technology and development of new products. The future was looking bright.
In 2019, the onset of the global pandemic brought unforeseen disruption to the market, but the company continued to move forward. However, the subsequent (and enduring) disruption to the supply chain caused by the pandemic proved incredibly difficult and the company engaged in a sales process in November, 2021. The goal was to find a parent for the company and continue to invest in new products and the technology. The process resulted in several interested parties and a sale was expected to be realized in the March timeframe. Unfortunately, that sale did not materialize. Consequently, the company was assigned to a financial services firm in March to optimize the assets of the company.
The pioneering work in smart lighting and world-class products have created an extraordinary following and community. Clearly, all Smartlabs’ employees who have worked so hard to produce such world-class products and technology hope that a buyer can be found for the company.
Although incredibly difficult, we hope that the Insteon community understands the tireless efforts by all the employees to serve our customers, and deeply apologize to the community.
Worked for me and yes to the login information … but HA is AGES slower than Insteon Hub in doing scenes
Assuming you still have the scenes already programmed in the PLM or HUB. To execute them with speed you are accustomed to you will want to run the PLM/HUB scene from Home Assistant. You can execute them using HA and from Alexa or the others. You can create Automation and Scripts for the scenes. The trick was to convert the hexadecimal scene number from the link database to decimal for the functions in HA. If you dump the link database and then sort the table by group number, it’s easy to determine what are the scenes and how they relate to devices.
I may not be completely following, but I think this may be what you’re referring to:
The scenes I have on my Hub I haven’t seen anywhere; those weren’t automatically imported into HA and I haven’t done anything to add them (didn’t know one could)
I separately created a scene within the HA browser and then ran the scene from my HA browser
I’m not running any automation, just simple scenes, like “all on” and “all off”
I haven’t done anything with hexadecimals or decimals (and don’t know how to do that); have only added the scene in HA using the embedded scene function
They mean doing this as a test – you only need the insteon scene number.
For instance, I have a group number “51” … that group turns on 2 lights and 2 switches.
If I call insteaon.scene_on and pass in group 51, it tells HA to tell the Insteaon Hub to execute on for group 51. This will immediately turn on all 4 entities.
Now if I have a HA scene or other code to turn on those switches, it is slower (one at a time) but works.
But … If you call the Insteon scene you are trading off HA awareness of the status. What does this mean:
a) calling insteon.scene_on is immediate BUT none of the lights/switches update their status in the HA GUI. They look off.
b) Calling HA to turn them on will be slower, one at a time, BUT the status of the lights is known and show in the GUI.
And now I use Nabu Casa and Alexa, so I say “Alexa, turn on Kitchen Lights”. So that is Alexa->Nabu Casa->My HA instance->Script for turning on (slower)->Lights … all works, GUI updated just not all at once. I really do not care for the “all at once” … I care that the GUI and light states are together.
There is a function in the HA Insteon plugin to print the Modem database but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. Currently I do it with insteon-terminal available from github.
I’m in the same situation. Which smart home skill did you add to Alexa?
Thanks.
The skill should be “Home Assistant”
I’d had an ISY set up long before coming to Home Assistant. I don’t care about their cloud stuff since I didn’t use it but I’m more upset about not being able to buy backup hardware. The switches don’t have an infinite life span and now it looks like I’ll have to start thinking about a new platform.
