Is there anyway of setting up links between two Insteon device using Home Assistant?
Judd
Checkout the documentation on the integration. You will need to use developer tools to get it done.
Any reason why you don’t want to use the app?
@chanders, when you say “app”, what do you mean? I am trying to setup a link between two Insteon devices without having to do the button presses on each device. In my previous Automation software, I was able to tell the Insteon plugin what two devices to setup a link between and it would create the link. I don’t see a way to do this within HA.
Same here… This is killing me. I’ve setup the tools and I still can’t figure it out. I’ve wasted WAY WAY too much time on this. The Link management from pyinsteon doesn’t seem to work very well. I’m having a hard time adding scenes (groups) as well.
I was referring to the actual Insteon app. I am not aware of a way to do the actual linking from within HA. I know pyinsteon has the functionality but I was unable to get it working due to lack of documentation and me not being able to figure it out with the little that there is.
FWIW I find it easier to setup scenes etc in the insteon app and just call the scenes from HA. That was i believe the “overhead” is minimum. I may be wrong but its much cleaner for me. YMMV.
I have a hub. I am using the Insteon app from the Apple App Store
Oh, okay. I’m using a PLM so I don’t have an external APP to use to setup the links. Hopefully it could be added to the Home Assistant Integration at some point.
I’ve had some success with insteon-mqtt for programming links. This was not easy and there are still some bugs I’m trying to work out.
I think there is a chance my insteon network isn’t very healthy in my house, many of the joining and pairing took painfully long and multiple attempts before they would all go through.
The main bug I’m trying to deal with right now is the scene cleanup that happens after sending a scene command. Lets say I send a scene command to turn off all lights.
What happens is that all light instantly turn off… (great! that’s what I was expecting)
BUT… for the next 20 or 30 seconds if you turn on a light manually, it will turn back off. This is quite the fight for what feels like forever if you’re sitting in the dark.
Should all links cleanup really take that long? I have over 65 devices right now.
I’m ready to abandon ship if there were a gold standard switch technology that solves my same set of needs.
Joe, are you using a PLM or HUB? Do you have dual mode devices. I have found that with my Insteon network (50 + devices) I have very good response time, but do get some commands stepped on if I hit some keypadlinc buttons to quickly after each other. Other than that, I could not live without the usefulness that the keypadlincs provide.
I use to use Homeseer before Home Assistant and its Insteon plugin allowed setting up links and it made the setup very easy. But overall performance was the same as I’m not getting in HA. I think a key part of it is using some of the latest versions of the Insteon devices.
I’ve been on Homeseer since before version 2… more than 15 years. I was using a Serial port PLM
I never saw as many slowness problems when running mnsandler’s plugin over the years, it’s been great. Any problems I found was usually due to a device that had gone bad.
I did buy a USB modem to put on homeassistant while I was testing home assistant before making the plunge, so that’s the one piece of hardware that’s very different here.
I have many dual mode devices, and I can tell they are making noise on the power lines because I see some of my LED bulbs very slight flicker when it’s communicating, it drives me nuts.
Yesterday I factory reset every single one of my swichlinc’s, dimmer modules, and keypad lincs.
It took me way over 4 hours to add them to insteon-mqtt using the join/pair/sync dance, when I’d have to pair or refresh 20 - 30 times for some of the devices.
A refresh-all command could take over a minute if any of the devices need a refresh…
I can find stubborn devices and run a refresh on just those a few times until they are current.
Once all of the devices database are current and no devices need to refresh, running the refresh-all command still takes more than 20 second to get through the list.
Is this normal?
I suspect the scene cleanup also takes a similar amount of time or more when I’m doing an “all light off” scene.
I can’t say I have seen a performance difference between Homeseer and Home Assistant and I would not expect to since the actual communications is being handled by the PLM and the Insteon devices. I have been spending more time getting my network back to the point it was in Homeseer, mainly due to features I used in Homeseer to build the links between devices is just not as robust in Home Assistant. I still have about another 25 devices to add to my Home Assistant Integration, so it will be sometime before I am back to where I was.
I’m still trying to figure out the speed things here using insteon-mqtt with home assistant.
I don’t really know if there is a good or correct support forum for this (insteon-mqtt)
The one thing that bugs me is that I don’t know if my experience is normal, or something is wrong.
Creating scenes and getting the links on or from the switches is all possible, but it’s incredibly time consuming. I can spend the better part of an hour doing refresh-all, finding 5 or 10 switch databases that aren’t cooperating, manually refreshing just those switches brute force until every switch in my network’s database is up to date. At which point I can do commands like sync-all or import-scenes.
I still have a problem when running scenes with lots of lights in them, it seems like the system won’t settle down for 30+ seconds if I wanted to control other lights during that time.