I must say my 60 insteon devices installed so far work far more reliably and faster than the 10 or so X10 devices and powerphase bridge that I had in before. (4300 sq ft house with extra 1900 ft garage 70 ft away). With Insteon I don't need to use polling since power-home remembers the status of devices linked to the PLC and I have all devices cross-linked to the PLC.
As a consumer my only problems with functionality not up to what could be expected from the advertising are the following:
blinking lights -- fixed with free swap out
blinking keypadlinc buttons -- fixed with free swap out.
KPL 1.0 forgetting its settings on power outage -- fixed with free swapout
Unfortunately for many consumers this would require an electrician.
Otherwise I think they have delivered on what they promised consumer vision of this product.
My biggest issues are as a developer:
SDK Documentation is way out of date and very incomplete.
Sample code mostly lacking - nothing was ever provided to excercise anything more than the most basic functionality. Nothing was provided to prove the different apis worked so we got to find out by trial and error what didn't. (caused me to not release any code to avoid the frustrations with trying to support it).
There is no clear change map about which issues exist in which devices,
there is no guidance about how old devices are to be handled as changes occur,
Extended messaging is still in the docs but doesn't work (there are slow work arounds).
There are other missing items in the api that really should have been there for automation. (such as direct read or write of KPL button status, or that automations software should have been able to set local on level and ramp rate, etc).
If Insteon/smarthome would update their docs and sdk for the developer and would provide clear guidance to the consumer/integrator/ and developers on change logs and future swap out plans I think alot of this worry could be avoided.
As a consumer my only problems with functionality not up to what could be expected from the advertising are the following:
blinking lights -- fixed with free swap out
blinking keypadlinc buttons -- fixed with free swap out.
KPL 1.0 forgetting its settings on power outage -- fixed with free swapout
Unfortunately for many consumers this would require an electrician.
Otherwise I think they have delivered on what they promised consumer vision of this product.
My biggest issues are as a developer:
SDK Documentation is way out of date and very incomplete.
Sample code mostly lacking - nothing was ever provided to excercise anything more than the most basic functionality. Nothing was provided to prove the different apis worked so we got to find out by trial and error what didn't. (caused me to not release any code to avoid the frustrations with trying to support it).
There is no clear change map about which issues exist in which devices,
there is no guidance about how old devices are to be handled as changes occur,
Extended messaging is still in the docs but doesn't work (there are slow work arounds).
There are other missing items in the api that really should have been there for automation. (such as direct read or write of KPL button status, or that automations software should have been able to set local on level and ramp rate, etc).
If Insteon/smarthome would update their docs and sdk for the developer and would provide clear guidance to the consumer/integrator/ and developers on change logs and future swap out plans I think alot of this worry could be avoided.
