Access to Insteon Lighting on Virtual Keypads for ELK

[foxtail22]

I installed an ISY994i to integrate my Insteon lighting automation into my ELK M1G and use ELK rules to control my lighting. To do that involved exporting a file created by the ISY and importing it to the ELK. The imported file overwrites the X10 lighting entries in the ELK lighting table. The ELK rules work fine for controlling the Insteon devices via the ISY. However, it seems the rules are the only way you can control insteon devices from the ELK. ELK-RP software allows the rules to be written but you cannot test the rules, view the status of the Insteon devices, or manually change the state of an Insteon device, because communications with the ISY is suspended while RP has the ELK in programming mode.

The virtual keypads(M1toGo, and the embedded HTML M1 keypad page) also do not provide access to the lighting devices. They display all the other categories such as security sensors, temp/thermostats, outputs, etc., but once the import file is loaded from the ISY, the lighting section comes up blank in both these virtual keypads. As a result, you have no way to either view the ON/OFF status of the Insteon devices, or change the state of the insteon lighting devices from the ELK.

It can be done from the ISY, but the reason for upgrading from my prior HAI/HouseLinc configuration, is to consolidate my fire/security/automation into one control interface.

Does anyone know of any way to enable the ELK to provide status and manual control of Insteon devices?

 

[gatchel]

Do you have the show check box checked by each lighting address in the Elk programming? If so, you should be able to control them through the lighting menu on a keypad for starters.

 

[tmbrown97]

I'm pretty sure you'll also need to do a re sync on M1ToGo. I know you have to with RMS after any changes.

 

[apostolakisl]

M12go should be providing you with control of all the lighting devices that you clicked the "show" as mentioned above in the Elk RP lighting page.

Keep in mind, that when you export from ISY both individual devices and scenes will be exported. You will not be able to change the order of the devices. You will be forced to export all of the devices unless you have the Elk module for ISY. Unless you have more than 250 scenes/devices that won't be a problem. The only way you will know which things are scenes and which are devices is by the name you gave them. I put an "s" at the end of all my scenes names in ISY for that reason and put an "L" at the end of the name of every device that is the load. The "s" is only helpful when exporting to Elk since ISY will always show you scenes and devices separately, but the "L" is valuable with both since ISY does not know which devices you connected the load to.

Also keep in mind that scenes do not have status'. So, if you turn a scene on or off from outside of elk m12go, you won't get any status change on your Elk controller. Individual devices inside of that scene will update and will show on the Elk program, but not the scene. When you turn the scene on from Elk, it will show the scene as "on", but that is a bit of mis-information since scenes have custom settings of multiple devices that may range from completely on to 100% or anything between. So really what it means when a scene is "on" in Elk m12go, is that the last time the scene was controlled from Elk, it was turned "on".

 

[foxtail22]

Thanks folks for all your responses. I had the show boxes checked before but in the process of doing an update after adding a couple Insteon LED bulbs(which by the way are great, with a great price), the update leaves the show boxs unchecked and I missed that. I also found that indeed as was stated, the M1toGo pad needs to have a resync done. Once I did those two things, I now have slider bars for each of my Insteon lighting devices.

This site has proven be one of the best forums going and I really appreciate the expert advice I have always gotten when I have had an issue. It is great to have all the extra brains to come to my aid because after a while, mine tends to start getting fried and scrambled.