Homeseer drops Insteon plugin development

[ctwilliams]

I thought someone surely had already mentioned this, but I could not find it here in a search.

According to a post on the homeseer forums, the on again off again development of their Insteon plugin looks to be off permantly. They seem to be working on an ISY plug in, now in beta, and all future insteon control will be developed with ISY in mind only.

Interesting

Homeseer Post.


CT

 

[electron]

I am seeing the same thing with other products as well. Even Elk recommends the ISY now. I guess SmartHome just made the protocol too difficult.

 

[upstatemike]

I suggested (on the Homeseer forum) that they do this a long time ago. If more vendors/manufacturers would take my advice in the first place when delveloping their products they would save themselves a lot of wasted time and effort. (No ego issues here!)

 

[Digger]

It was inevitable. SH is to difficult to work with. You really have to give UDI a lot of credit for dealing with the problems so well. They seem to really compensate for a lot of SH shortcomings.

 

[macromark]

The subject line of this thread makes it sound like we've dropped support for Insteon but that's not the case at all. In fact, our support for Insteon via the ISY controller should be significantly better than what we've been able to offer up to this point. Insteon has been a very difficult protocol to support but the UDI folks are committed to keeping their ccntrollers up to date as new devices are released.

Mark

 

[Lagerhead]

Can someone clue me as to what this is about? The relationship between Insteon and ISY?

I have a lot of X-10 inherited with the house and have not contemplated a change because it works -- whether because of the layout of the house, neighborhood factors, just plain good luck, or who knows. I can get to any remote corner of the house with very high reliability.

I have a few Insteon components but I got them strictly for their X-10 capability. At least before I swore never to buy anything from SH again, ever.

As X-10 is disappearing and Insteon and/or ISY may be in my future, I guess I need to know more.

 

[upstatemike]

Can someone clue me as to what this is about? The relationship between Insteon and ISY?

I have a lot of X-10 inherited with the house and have not contemplated a change because it works -- whether because of the layout of the house, neighborhood factors, just plain good luck, or who knows. I can get to any remote corner of the house with very high reliability.

I have a few Insteon components but I got them strictly for their X-10 capability. At least before I swore never to buy anything from SH again, ever.

As X-10 is disappearing and Insteon and/or ISY may be in my future, I guess I need to know more.

Not sure where you heard that X-10 is disappearing but that is certainly not the case. A lot of people who have had trouble with X-10 are moving to Insteon and other technologies but if X-10 works for you then why change? You will be in a good position to get some great deals on used X-10 stuff from folks who are switching over to something else!

 

[DavidL]

I think the Smarthome folks made a big blunder when they did not engineer and freely release the equivelent of UPB's UpStart for management of the Insteon devices. Not that they shouldn't have provided an API to it for the hardware/ software companies that wanted to customize it, but there should have been a corporate owned utility for Link management provided to the end users for free.

It's been a major PITA to keep up with.

 

[johndoe74]

Wouldn't it be an overkill to use ISY as an Insteon controller for Homeseer? I mean, for a $329 device, ISY is designed to be a standalone automation controller, complete with event programming, just like Homeseer. You will now have two places to program the events, but if you just use homeseer to drive the events, then ISY becomes a dumb controller. Am I missing something here? I don't see alot of Homeseer Insteon users willing to pay $329 for ISY just to be able to receive Insteon events. If there's a stripped down ISY that costs $99 and have no event programming ability, then it's a different story.

By the way, I am sure Insteon protocol is hard to program. But apparently that didn't stop makers of Indigo and Powerhome to add support for new devices. I think Homeseer Tech has invested too much into Z-Wave that it doesn't make sense for them to allocate resources on Insteon. On the other hand, by relying on ISY plugin, they can claim to support Insteon. Best of both worlds.

 

[ver0776]

My goal has to bring affordable home automation to people, and adding $300 to the cost of a starter system puts it out of reach for many people. A $60 PC controller to interface HA software to the hardware is very reasonable. I think this puts Insteon out of reach for many people, and the loss of faith in them to even maintain viability of using their PLC makes me not want to recommend Insteon even if they can afford it.

My suggestion to them is to open source their SDM so if they are not willing to fix it the community can fix it up enough that every software package out there would have a easy low cost of investment way to interface to their hardware. Then again, if they can't get their own HA app to work well, not sure what any of us can do with it. I basically wrap their SDM class to hide the functions that don't work and add some of my own on top so I have a better working SDM than what they release... It is still a piece of junk though.

Vaughn

 

[upstatemike]

Wouldn't it be an overkill to use ISY as an Insteon controller for Homeseer? I mean, for a $329 device, ISY is designed to be a standalone automation controller, complete with event programming, just like Homeseer. You will now have two places to program the events, but if you just use homeseer to drive the events, then ISY becomes a dumb controller. Am I missing something here? I don't see alot of Homeseer Insteon users willing to pay $329 for ISY just to be able to receive Insteon events. If there's a stripped down ISY that costs $99 and have no event programming ability, then it's a different story.

By the way, I am sure Insteon protocol is hard to program. But apparently that didn't stop makers of Indigo and Powerhome to add support for new devices. I think Homeseer Tech has invested too much into Z-Wave that it doesn't make sense for them to allocate resources on Insteon. On the other hand, by relying on ISY plugin, they can claim to support Insteon. Best of both worlds.

Yes I think you might be overlooking some key points:

1- Insteon does not work well with multiple controllers, especially once you scale beyond 50 or so devices. This means that your Insteon controller needs to be both your device to device link manager as well as your automation interface... otherwise things just won't stay in sync and you will have constant problems with your device link tables as one contoller overwrites stuff programmed by another controller. An ISY works very well in this role because it has a robust link management interface and and solid protocol for HA systems to interface to.

2- Insteon programming requires a lot of maintenance because of firmware updates, new devices, and PLM issues. It makes sense to invest resources to deal with this if your main revenue stream is an Insteon based product or program but it does not make financial sense to tie up that level of resources for an accessory to your main product that only applies to a subset of your customers.

3- The ISY is already accepted as a standard method of adding Insteon functionality to products and is used by Elk, IES, InterfaceGo and others.

4- New features developed by Universal Devices for the ISY will automatically enhance the HS ISY plugin. This means features will be added MUCH faster than would be possible for a HS resource who is splitting their time among many different HS plugins.

5- HS is a platform for integrating multiple devices and there is almost always some overlap between HS and the built-in functionality of the device being integrated. In this case it is mainly timers and Insteon triggers. More important are the areas where they compliment each other... ISY cannot provide voice output, A/V integration, etc. while HS cannot manage Insteon device to device links or program advanced Insteon keypadlinc features. Probably one of the most flexible HA systems available right now is an ISY+Elk M1+Hometroller2+Way2Call.

6- Unless you have a truly trivial Insteon installation, $329 is a pretty small price to manage the rest of your Insteon investment. If Insteon switches cost $10 or $15 apiece then it might be unreasonable to spend $329 just to manage them but at $45 per Insteon switch, the price of the ISY is very worthwhile.

 

[johndoe74]

upstatemike, I have no doubts that ISY is a better Insteon controller than HS2+PLM plugin, and that ISY+HS2 will make a killer combo. But I still wish there's a cheaper version of ISY that does not have timers and programs that will cost less than $150 (perhaps a firmware change can restrict those features?)

For my case, I have only 15 Insteon devices, but planning to add a couple new Insteon motion sensors. In order to use them, now I have to pay $329 for ISY. At least HST should have added motion sensor support to the PLM plug-in before they totally shutdown its development. Or is there possibilities of making the PLM plug-in open source?

 

[GraysonPeddie]

Since I already got PLM, ISY 99i costs how much? $279?

I can do that after I get out of college. Unless if SmartHome can let me split the payments into 3 monthly payments; however, I have a low-end income with my rent costing me 50% to 55% of my expenses.

Plus, I already have Elk as a home automation controller.

 

[upstatemike]

I appreciate that the cost 0f an ISY99 is high for very small scale installations and that the ISY26 is probably a better option for those folks. I don't however buy into the argument that if you have HS + a PLM or an Elk + a PLM that you have an Insteon controller. Neither of those platforms will manage Insteon links beyond the ones they establish for their own use and unfortunately that just does not cut it with the way the Insteon protocol works. You need to have one central authority (PLM) that is responsible for all link creation and editing or you will get very bad things happening in the link tables of your modules and switches. Maybe in small setups where things don't change much, the problems don't happen right away but you can't standardize on a solution that won't scale without breaking.

PowerHome does not have problems because it manages all links, not just the ones it uses in its programs. The same is true of the ISY99 and EZServe hardware controllers. Homeseer is not in the business of developing platforms like this so they chose an existing one to interface with. This is much more in line with the business model they are following for their other plugins than trying to develop a full blown link management app would be.

Also, if you are aleady using the Elk M1 with Insteon the ISY will also become the interface for that as well and you will have much better M1/Insteon integration.

 

[GraysonPeddie]

But then I'll have to buy an Ethernet expander for Elk...

But nevermind... I live in my apartment and I do have few Insteon devices...

M1 and Insteon integrates very well just fine without an ISY for me. So if I want to move to HomeSeer for home automation and have HomeSeer talk with Elk, I don't see why I need an ISY for home automation...

I might have to compare PowerHome to HomeSeer...