I’ve seen some efforts to bridge from Hubitat to Insteon but they require another computer as an intermediary and aren’t particularly straight forward. With tens of thousands of Insteon devices out there with no way to control them since Insteon went out of business, I’m wondering if any developers in the Hubitat community are considering stepping up to the challenge?
There’s a couple choices already:
There is this Hubitat integration that can be used as described by @SmartHomePrimer
There’s also a home Assistant integration for Insteon, and HA can be integrated with Hubitat.
I manage my Insteon system with Universal Devices ISY. It worked well, and still works well, except I have been migrating away from it (into Hubitat) as devices have not been available for quite some time and it was looking like pretty much the end of Insteon. No replacements for devices that aged out or started to fail, and the writing has been on the wall for a long time.
Yes, I’ve been reviewing the approach you suggest. I’ve done a fair amount of programming using Rule Machine, but this is quite a bit more intimidating. I have a W10 machine always running on my network but not sure if it can act as an intermediary between Hubitat and Insteon Hub? Or do I need to use a Pi computer?
I suspect others would be intimidated by this solution as well. With so many stranded Insteon users at this point, it might be worthwhile for Hubitat to include Insteon support natively. That sure would invite a slew of Insteon users to purchase a Hubitat, IMHO.
I believe the ISY approach also requires a hardware bridge to be able to send the signals over the power lines, as is done in addition to RF for most Insteon devices. I don’t believe that bridge is available any longer.
It can. You can use a VM running some flavor of Linux on W10.
It does - uses the PLM, and like everything else, it is no longer available. If mine dies, I'm out of luck unless I can get one on eBay. I'm transition off Insteon and Isy, and selling off components to those who are still trying to keep themselves going.
I'm about halfway off Isy and halfway on Hubitat. I've stalled because I'm second guessing my choice of Lutron Caseta switches. They are reliable, but I don't like them. I was much happier with my Insteon switches. I stopped and I'm waiting to try the Inovelli Blue Series when they become available. I'm hesitant to put myself at the mercy of another small company though. I was testing the Inovelli Red Series when THEY became unavailable and I had to abandon that idea.
Have you considered RA2Select? The switches/dimmers are more conventional in appearance, but with the extraordinary reliability that Lutron and the ClearConnect protocol offer.
Sounding like two ways to go - use a Linux machine to bridge between Hubitat and Insteon devices or replace all of my Insteon devices with something that is directly compatible with Hubitat.
I would welcome more discussion on what folks have found to be the best replacements for Insteon switches. Mine have been ultra reliable and attractive. It sounds like it is easy to be disappointed by some of the replacement devices out there.
Of course, my wish would be that a Hubitat developer would make Insteon native to the hub.
This would require entirely new hardware with a new radio.
Tagging @SmartHomePrimer - he has an Insteon setup that is brought into Hubitat using a node server.
I've been using Insteon since its inception in 2002 (before that, BSR X-10). This past February I switched to Z-Wave Plus and Hubitat, because replacement switches became so hard to find. I find the reliability of Z-Wave Plus just as good as Insteon, and its so nice not being stuck in a sole source situation.
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Or Raspbian, or Windows with a VM, or a Docker container, or MacOS (which I personally use)
Lutron RA2 is the only thing even close in cost, but it's not close in cost really. Insteon was a bargain for what it's capable of.
You very likely will be. When I sold my house, I removed all my Insteon. A decision I'm very glad for. I sold my old home as a Smart Home, so I replaced the Insteon with even more Lutron Caséta switches. They are rock solid, but between the time the house sold and our actual move, the whole family really came to dislike that fact that they always turn on to full when you press the ON button, and you cannot program that into their dimmers, unlike Insteon or the much more expensive Lutron RA2. Honestly, had I not already outfitted my new house with Insteon, I might have been tempted to put in Caséta, even at a higher cost than my existing Insteon equipment if they just had that one feature enhancement.
Z-Wave switches, no thanks. My Insteon NEVER drop off the network, and I've never had one of their devices fail. I know it's not impossible for one to fail, but they are simply better built than most of the consumer level switches out there in my experience.
That's just not going to happen. There's no sound business model for buying the guts of a defunct company to add proprietary radios for a market segment that has for many years now been significantly smaller than either Z-Wave or Zigbee. The gap just kept getting larger and larger until they eventually imploded on themselves. It a shame, but it's the reality.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of enthusiastic developers out there that are working on, or have already built workarounds using Home Assistant or other software that runs in Node or Python. Don't panic. That is mostly what's going on right now. If you can write a file to a micro SD card, and put it into a Raspberry Pi, you can setup Home Assistant. That can give you a means to control Insteon devices. It's not better than the Hubitat node.js solution, but it's easier to setup. The Home Assistant solution works with the PLMs and the hubs. There's also a panel you can add to Home Assistant that allows you to edit the device parameters like Ramp rate and default brightness. See this post for more details.
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From what I’m hearing here, there appears to be more than one way to integrate Insteon devices into a Hubitat environment. I also get it that an intermediary device is required because of the Insteon power line signaling and radio requirements that are not in the Hubitat hardware.
I could see having native support of Insteon devices in Hubitat as long as some sort of outboard device is available for purchase. Sounds like an opportunity for Hubitat and a third party hardware manufacturer to provide support for Insteon devices.
Not really. Very small market. With no foreseeable manufacturer of switches/outlets/dimmers/etc until Insteon's IP gets sold.
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Interestingly, if you are a glutton for punishment, you can install NodeJs directly on Windows
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Oh wow. That sounds similarly painful to my experience of getting a Python3 virtual environment running on an old Mac for Home Assistant Core. A nightmare I'm going to blissfully leave behind in a few weeks when I have my RPi 4 up and running Home Assistant Supervised.
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I'll check it out. Guess I'd need a new bridge.
Its actually super easy, it has its own windows installer. I ran that for a while with Homebridge on it before I moved everything to a VM running DietPi (a custom light debian). The thing thats a pain is there is not a great way to make stuff run on boot with windows, and also updating is more complicated. Otherwise it ran great.
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Our two previous homes used Insteon. We switched to Z-wave for the current one, although I strongly considered Insteon because I liked the dual signaling (powerline plus RF). Recently, I've been installing Lutron Caseta, which I really like. Lutron is a more established company compared to Insteon or Smartlabs, but given this surprising market development, I'm no longer fully comfortable relying on any proprietary technology or any one company, although that's not very practical, I suppose. In theory and concept, all my Apple computers and devices are in the same type of boat.
The key to Insteon for automation is now the PowerLine Module (PLM) because if that goes, there's no way for an automation system to communicate with the devices. Hopefully some company can obtain a license for the technology and manufacture those at a reasonable price. If I can find an old one or two in my "junk box", I plan to send it/them to the owner of my most recent former home, at no charge, even if I'm ot sure it still works (it might be repairable). We owned that home for about eight years and sold it over 2.5 years ago, but I want to help the owner extend the life of their system if I can. This Insteon situation just really, really stinks and speaks volumes about the business practices of the people who owned that company.
As mentioned in the two other post topics, a 2242 or 2245 Hub also works. We never tested a 2242 hub with the node.js integration for Hubitat, but the Insteon server and client listener was developed by Scott Kuester (same dev the wrote the Homebridge integration for Insteon) on a 2242 hub. The HTTP commands to the PLM are the same, so there should be no reason it wouldn't work. Home Assistant can also work with both the 2242 and 2245 hubs, as well as the PLMs. There's actually a lot of options. Once the craziness subsides, there will be some good deals out there, just going to take a few months for them to come around. I personally view it like being able to buy near Lutron RA2 quality equipment at bargain basement prices.
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