Can Somebody Explain What This Does?

[LarrylLix]

I think you are correct on most of your assumptions. I get the same feel.
 
I haven't seen much interest in caller-ID but if some are interested I am sure a nodeserver for PolyGlot/PolISY will be forthcoming. I am not sure about a fee for the nodeservers. Many would like it that way but it seems to go against UDI's concepts which seem to have no interest in making profits??? The whole thigs sounds like a personal interest that is becoming a larger company despite owner resistance.
 
I am not sure about the fade of Insteon to Zwave on ISY as I think 'the grass was much greener' on the Zwave side of things. As experience mounts, many have found Zwave has as many, or more problems, than Insteon does. Of course, like Insteon, Zwave went through some bad early developments and has continued to improve.
 
This is one of the reasons UDI has always labelled later software "beta". I don't agree with the label but the Zwave drivers are never finished. UDI wants to make these "drivers" more user definable and more "plug-in" so the actual firmware can be divorced from the device definition tables inside the firmware.
 
BTW: A UDI employee is one of the top dogs at Insteon now, so we will see if anything changes in the next few years.

 

[upstatemike]

Is it true that the Hue Node can't control Hue scenes? I was counting on being able to use an Insteon KeypadLinc and assign different colors to each button to quickly set the mood in a room.

 

[LarrylLix]

Is it true that the Hue Node can't control Hue scenes? I was counting on being able to use an Insteon KeypadLinc and assign different colors to each button to quickly set the mood in a room.

Sorry. I don't know. I tried the Hue NS when it first was released but didn't like the way the colours had to be specified and my Hue bulbs didn't match their charts anyway.
 
I just used ISY Network resources up until a few months ago when I scrapped my 5 Hue bulbs. One of the themes used here is Christmas, and my Hue bulbs could never do green, lacking a green LED inside. Sick of power blinks turning them all on 100% white while sleeping. Nice interface but crappy bulbs and they require a hub.

 

[upstatemike]

I kind of need the hub. I have 21 Lifx bulbs for my outdoor lamp posts, porches and coach lights and it quickly became apparent that scaling out Wi-Fi at the individual bulb level just isn't practical. Fortunately they fixed the "all on from a power blink" issue but only if your bulbs are new enough to support the latest firmware. Bigger issue is the capacity of a single Hue hub is impractical while different strategies to aggregate the devices from multiple hubs are all kind of flaky. Still looking for the best way to scale out color bulbs.

 

[LarrylLix]

I kind of need the hub. I have 21 Lifx bulbs for my outdoor lamp posts, porches and coach lights and it quickly became apparent that scaling out Wi-Fi at the individual bulb level just isn't practical. Fortunately they fixed the "all on from a power blink" issue but only if your bulbs are new enough to support the latest firmware. Bigger issue is the capacity of a single Hue hub is impractical while different strategies to aggregate the devices from multiple hubs are all kind of flaky. Still looking for the best way to scale out color bulbs.

I am running 32 WiFi bulbs and RGBWW strips right now. My latest software update was to put in 90 second Keepalive HTTP query hits on each and every one, so I can get a quick response when I want ISY to operate them.  I allow them to freerun so that the keepalive queries get staggered and any actual control resets the timeclock individually.
When I operate a bunch of them simultaneously I operate each third bulb, then an alternate third, and then the last third, in order to hide the popcorn effect somewhat and I thought I could animate them in thirds to show motion around the house. I am not happy with that yet as the porch lights are too far apart to look like animation.
 
I tried the PolyGlot Nodeserver for the Magichome bulbs but found it needed a lot of polish yet and ISY created scenes were a wash. The fastest they would operate was about 1 second per unit so an ISY program would be just as fast. The Polyglot NS queries each bulb before controlling it and then again after. This all takes too much time because they disconnect (timeout)  their sockets between operations.
 
My router is showing 58 devices connected at most times all on 2.4GHz.

 

[upstatemike]

So it sounds like you are confirming that Wi-Fi based lighting isn't going to be able to scale.

 

[LarrylLix]

So it sounds like you are confirming that Wi-Fi based lighting isn't going to be able to scale.

I don't know what "scale" means.

 

[upstatemike]

I don't know what "scale" means.

 
I figure I have around 300 light bulbs in my house that are all automated with one technology or another. If I wanted to move half of them to Wi-Fi bulbs it sounds from what you are saying that there would be serious traffic and latency concerns. This in addition to regular IP address space concerns... I currently have 200 addresses reserved in my router table and I want to save at least 20 for a DHCP pool. Expanding the address space also expands the broadcast domain so not sure how far you can go there without issues. So my conclusion is that Wi-Fi bulbs and "hubless automation" generally will not scale very well and so hubs and other technologies continue to be needed to offload that traffic from the IP network.
 
As the price of automation comes down to where automating at the bulb level rather than the switch level becomes more practical, all those extra device addresses have to be managed somewhere. With hubs like Hue limiting themselves to 50 device per and no clean way to aggregate across hubs and the challenges with trying to expand  Wi-Fi bulb counts beyond a certain threshold it looks like there is currently no good way to scale out an installation of smart bulbs where scale means "a lot more than 50."

 

[LarrylLix]

I figure I have around 300 light bulbs in my house that are all automated with one technology or another. If I wanted to move half of them to Wi-Fi bulbs it sounds from what you are saying that there would be serious traffic and latency concerns. This in addition to regular IP address space concerns... I currently have 200 addresses reserved in my router table and I want to save at least 20 for a DHCP pool. Expanding the address space also expands the broadcast domain so not sure how far you can go there without issues. So my conclusion is that Wi-Fi bulbs and "hubless automation" generally will not scale very well and so hubs and other technologies continue to be needed to offload that traffic from the IP network.
 
As the price of automation comes down to where automating at the bulb level rather than the switch level becomes more practical, all those extra device addresses have to be managed somewhere. With hubs like Hue limiting themselves to 50 device per and no clean way to aggregate across hubs and the challenges with trying to expand  Wi-Fi bulb counts beyond a certain threshold it looks like there is currently no good way to scale out an installation of smart bulbs where scale means "a lot more than 50."

Yeah. That count seems like it would become a problem no matter what protocol you do. I did like the Hue being a ZigBee spin-off and they daisychain communicate. Not sure of the exact topography. They did seem to be fast, even when operating them out of ISY individually from programs through Network resources.
The problem I caused myself in the past with Network Resources is sharing three NR for all bulbs. ISY has a caching problem where the variable substitution is done at transmit time instead of caching time. This means if the last packet is not transmitted yet and an ISY program changes the variable the new value will get used for the previous transmission request. UDI stated they would work on it and make it an option perhaps. Nothing yet after two to three years.
 
 I didn't know the Hue bridge/hub had a limitation but I paid almost $200 for my first three bulbs so that was never going to happen here. My last 24 bulbs I paid about $11 Canuck buck = about $8 USD each.
 
The DHCP reservation table would certainly become a problem. I have two decent routers running but they don't like/permit having two DHCP servers running so one just becomes a slave and has already complained about memory space for device names.
Things change in this old world pretty quickly. Who knows what will become obsoleted next?...our wallets?

 

[upstatemike]

I think what is needed is color bulbs that can be directly associated with wired wall switches but still be monitored and controlled by a central automation system.
 
Hue - No wired switches.
 
Wi-Fi  No direct association between switches and bulbs plus address space issues when scaled
 
Insteon - No Bulbs
 
Z-Wave - Poor history with bulbs - Not sure if direct association between switches and bulbs is supported? (only heard of direct association between switches)
 
Zigbee - Can't find an example of a wired Zigbee switch directly controlling a Zigbee bulb.
 
I am surprised that nobody except me sees value in controlling color bulb lighting from a wired switch without an Internet dependency. Doubly surprised that Polyglot, Hubitat, etc. have not stepped up to bridge the gap. I don't see any examples where you can use one of those products to have a wired keypad select different scene colors with the color bulbs in a room. Maybe there are folks doing it on some platform with some back-end programming but it seems like color bulb scene control should be a simple no-brainer button to bulb association.

 

[LarrylLix]

My RGBWW bulbs and strips are controlled by a wall switch via ISY, not directly. Most bulbs remember their  olour and brightness levels so a simple power interupting switch could do the job somewhat.
 
My Insteon switchlinc controls all of the brightness levels and a few preset colour scenes. I use different techniques for different switches. For my ensuite I use double taps downs on the switch to rotate through about 8 colour jumps. If no actions is seen for over 5 seconds the next double tap turns the light strip off again. That switch also runs the ensuite main lighting.
 
Most of my colour scenes are set using Alexa controlling programs in my ISY that implement a few dozen different colour themes. It's just easier that way and there is no limit to the number of themes available. I don't see much use for a wall switch to control colours. My Gathering room central switch sets colour themes on depending on the time of year when it is long tapped down (dimmed down) but it never gets used,

 

[upstatemike]

While I would likely use Alexa myself to set color scenes in most situations I also need to accommodate guests with an intuitive user interface so switches and keypads are important for my application. I guess I will be able to leverage my ISY to do what i want but not until Polisys is released in October.

 

[LarrylLix]

While I would likely use Alexa myself to set color scenes in most situations I also need to accommodate guests with an intuitive user interface so switches and keypads are important for my application. I guess I will be able to leverage my ISY to do what i want but not until Polisys is released in October.

I don't know why PolISY would make any difference to your operation??? AFAICT it's just a way to get PolyGlot and ISY into one box, other than the obvious port and CPU speeds.
 
I have found guests shouldn't operate complicated things. Keep them to straight white full on. Even the wife is starting to show capable vocals recently.
 
Funny story...just had a showing for selling our house. Like a good boy the agent tried to turn all the lights off and I watched him (webcam) go around the room, reach under every lamp and snap the switch on every cord beneath the table, in order to get the dozen lamps off! If he would have tapped the wall switch on the bottom they all would have went off. Geeeshhhh!  How can one imagine we turn on a dozen lamps like that? LOL
 
At another showing I watched a conscientious agent try to turn the lights off by holding the main SwitchLinc down causing slow dimming and my lights went through multiple colour schemes..LOL.
(Note I have added lots of extra 'u's in words so you can hear the accent..LOL) 

 

[upstatemike]

Polysys matters because I don't have time to figure out Polyglot on a RasPi right now. Too many other projects take priority over that. Polisys should give me a relatively "plug n play" way to use Polyglot without allocating time to a learning curve.

 

[LarrylLix]

Polysys matters because I don't have time to figure out Polyglot on a RasPi right now. Too many other projects take priority over that. Polisys should give me a relatively "plug n play" way to use Polyglot without allocating time to a learning curve.

I hear you there. I worked on Linux clone systems back in the 1980s, wrote drivers for HDD and FDD devices, etc.. but the RPi linux drives me nuts with undocumented "guess until it works" methods. I just gave up for about a year, out of frustration, before getting back into it. I use it for web browsing but as soon a Linux got into a GUI it has more problems than Windows does. MsDos can still make grandiose stability  claims also.
 
PolyGlot was fairly easy to install as the writer was a real pro and tried to make it very easy to work with for the user. If you get problems, yeah it's a messy mystery for me yet, mostly. Once running, the nodeservers are easy to install from a list. Just click what you want and it does the rest, usually.They really seem to be trying to make it lay person friendly. Access and setup is via any browser from other locations.
But then most things seems easy once you have suffered through it without sleep.
 
Alas! it all does take time, for sure. Some don't want 90% hobby and 10% function.