I have Insteon switches, a couple I have linked together through the switches so that when one switch is turned on / off the other switch duplicates it. This works fine.
When I attempt to trigger one of the switches from a HA Automation, only the one switch reacts, but not the 2nd switch which is linked via the switch itself.
So, I’m assuming that when a HA Automation triggers one switch, the switch itself doesn’t have the ability to communicate to the 2nd switch because it was triggered via an automation and not the switch hardware paddle.
If I want to create the behavior described above, I need to create an automation that turn on / off both switches?
when two insteon devices are linked such that device A is setup to be a responder and device B the controller, then this means that when device A is locally-operated by a human user pressing its buttons, that device B will act as controller and will transmit a message corresponding to the action (i.e. on, off, bright, dim) to device A and device A will receive and respond to that message by taking the corresponding action.
this is the underlying mechanism for sync’ing insteon devices. actually for typical “virtual three-way switch” setup, this gets implemented in both directions with controller=A and responder=B and also with controller=B and responder=A.
this does NOT make it so that if device A receives a command from home-assistant to turn on, that will also result in device B turning on. that’s not how it works.
you can use an automation (or a blueprint) to achieve the sync’ing you’re after. a good blueprint will take care of details like avoiding sending redundant commands over the wire or worse, avoiding getting into infinite loops.
You could have the automation control both switches. Or you could set up an Insteon Scene (which is different than and Home Assistant Scene) and control the scene.
Note: I have yet to set up an Insteon Scene because I had done this in my ISY994i and when I switched over to the Insteon Integration, all my scenes were already in my PLM. So I haven’t actually created and Insteon Scene from HA. I make the assumption that the documentation is adequate.
So look at the Managing the Insteon Scenes section of the documentation.
I agree in using the Insteon scene. That way the automation just essentially runs scene.on from HA. The design also let’s you just adjust an individual device directly without impacting anything else.