Manually adding Insteon Devices

Is there a way to manually add an Insteon device to Home Assistant. I have about a half a dozen or so inlinelinc devices that I know the device address but in order to add them by their “Set” button would require me to disassemble the fixture. If I could add them by adding their address to the Insteon Integration, it would save me a lot of work.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Judd

@teharris1, do you have any tips on doing the above ^

are they already linked to the PLM? If so, the HA will find them. If not, unfortunately, they need to be put into linking mode manually.

No, they are not linked to the PLM connected to HA. They are linked to a PLM on my old Homeseer PC.

Do you have any timeframe to when you’re dashboard for Insteon will be out? I though I saw the ability to add a device from the video you posted.

The PR is waiting for a code review and I have no timeline on that. It can take months. Since this is a big PR it will take a while for sure. The dashboard does not do what you are asking since the dashboard would require you to have the device already linked to the PLM. What the dashboard allows is for the device’s ALDB to be directly modified but that is not the same thing.

Would you consider moving the PLM from your old Homeseer PC to the HA computer?

My legacy PLM is a serial interface and my NUC just has USB connections. I guess I could use an adapter, but how would HA work with two PLM’s?

How technical are you? If you are comfortable with downloading a python module directly and running some commands at the command prompt I can set something up where you can link to the new PLM then HA will see the devices.

I’m pretty technical, novice with Python, but can work myself around the CLI. Your help is appreciated.

OK, I am going to post an update to the pyinsteon module that will allow you to perform remote linking. Just note not all devices respond to a request to go into linking mode. Hopefully the ones you are refering to will :slight_smile:

I just pushed a change to my local pyinsteon github repo. Here is the link to the branch.

Clone this to your local machine (let me know if you need help with that). Install this patch and run insteon_tools from a command line. Let me know if you are using Windows or Linux. If you are using Windows we may need to patch your pyserial-asyncio module.

Thanks for the update. I’m going to need to wait for a USB to RS232 adapter to get delivered before I can proceed. I am running the Intel NUC version of HA so it is Linux based. I’m probably going to need some instructions on how to get your code onto my HA device. I have downloaded the code to one of my desktops but I’m not sure where it needs to go in the HA directory structure. I’m not too familiar with code deployments from GitHub.

Sorry, I don’t understand. Your USB modem does connect to you Linux box already, right? The patch I created should allow that to link your devices to the modem without touching the devices.

Maybe I didn’t explain my setup correctly. I currently have a PLM which is USB based connected to my NUC. This PLM is currently being used by HA and I have added all of the Insteon devices by linking them to the PLM. I have a second PLM that is RS232 based. This was connected to my Homeseer PC and has the Insteon devices that I don’t have easy access to, in order to link them to the USB PLM. So I was hoping that your revised Insteon python script would allow me to use the devices on this second PLM. But since my NUC does not have any RS232 ports, I needed to get a USB to RS232 converter. What I am uncertain of is if your script will know how to talk to this device/COM port.

OK, thanks. The new code does not require your old modem at all. The purpose of the new code is to allow you to add the hidden devices to the new USB based PLM without touching the devices.

Oh Okay. Can you provide me with the steps on what I need to do?

If you are using a Linux based system to attach your PLM you don’t need step 2:

  1. Install the code from the branch above:
    python3 -m pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/teharris1/pyinsteon.git@patch12
    (you may need git installed, I am not sure because I do already have it. If you do let me know)

  2. Upgrade the pyserial-asyncio library:
    python3 -m pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/pyserial/pyserial-asyncio.git

  3. Run insteon_tools and at the pyinsteon command prompt enter the following:

connect <usb path, ie. /dev/ttyUSB0>`
link_device <address>

This should be all that is needed.

When it comes to Python, I’m a completely newbe. I’m not sure what directory to issue those commands at. Could you provide some more detailed instructions?

@teharris1 , can you point me in the right direction regarding the directory to issue those commands in?

You really can execute these in any directory. Probably the easiest approach is to run those commands on your Windows machine. Open a command prompt and make sure you have python installed.

Sorry, I’m confused. My HA system is an Intel NUC. It is not running windows. Are you saying to move my Insteon PLM to a windows machine, install python and run the provided commands from there?