Apparently Insteon is no more

[Steve Horn]

I know I’m late to the party here. But everything HB-related has been working flawlessly. But today, i chose to replace a failed Insteon wall switch with a spare. Then i discovered that Insteon (i.e. Smarthome/Smartlabs) is apparently out of business. This begs the question of what to replace Insteon lighting control with as it relates to Housebot. Like I said, late to the party, but a brief search here didnt find anything. My son’s A/V/home automation business is using Lutron Caseta and RadioRA, which is, i assume, IP addressed instead of PLC. Of course, I could migrate lighting to Alexa devices and set up tasks within the Alexa app. But not sure how Alexa hardware (wall switches, plugs, etc.) can be controlled via HB. I know (and I use) Alexa can be used to control devices etc. “built” and controlled by HB. So, several questions: 1) How can HB control Lutron or other lighting control devices? 2) Can HB address/control Alexa hardware? Summing up, what facilities are available to replace Insteon? And I apologize if this has been discussed here before.

[Steve Horn]

<crickets>

[ScottBot]

Steve,

As far as how HouseBot can control Alex devices, it can't directly. I believe Alexa does have a way to do this from HouseBot, but I remember the API for doing it was going to be a lot of effort to implement. And for me, I just have Alexa control HouseBot (ZWave and a X10).

[Steve Horn]

Thanks. Me too - Alexa using HB to control stuff behind HB. At some point I guess I need to migrate toward ZWave or some other method of lighting control. (I'm surprised you or anyone else is still using X10. I had 1 or two stand-alone (non-HB) lighting control applications, but the hardware became too finicky. Pitched all the X10 stuff.)

[ScottBot]

I just have a couple of old X10 things. One is really far away and would be out of the range for the ZWave controller.

The thing about X10 is... it's cheap, and it works.

[ScottBot]

And at some point I'd like to start switching over to Matter devices, since they seem to be the future if you believe all the hype. I haven't done any research into it to figure out what my controller options are or how to even start writing a HouseBot interface for it.

[Richard Naninck]

I just looked into an Aqara FP2 presence sensor and came around Matter as well. Aqara works with its own bridge or Homey or any other zwave bridge. For me integration with HouseBot has become easy since HouseBot interfaces with Node-Red and MQTT. There are so many options now and most of them use MQTT. I still have to buy a Homey bridge but as I understand it, all devices that talk to Homey, can be put on MQTT and with that relay to HouseBot.
But in due time, it would be nice to have something native to HouseBot in whatever form applicable.

[Steve Horn]

For Z-wave device (light switches) control by HB, what is required? A hub, similar to the Insteon PLM?

[ScottBot]

Yes, a hub. Not all hubs are the same, but it should work with most usb or serial attached devices (but keep your receipt in case it's incompatible). I use the ZCS101 (not sure if it is even on the market still). I've also done some testing with the Aeotec z-stick.

[Steve Horn]

Thanks! Aeotec: presumably the USB dongle version and not the (apparently) standalone hub.(Dunno how HB would interface to that one.)

[ScottBot]

Right. USB or Serial (not too many of these)

[Steve Horn]

Ordered an Aeotec z stick 7 and a smart switch to test. I’m curious about the z-wave stick’s range.

[Steve Horn]

Well, clearly, I'm missing a step. I installed the stick, identified the COM port, added the hardware interface to HB, but cannot enable the thing. Restarted HB until the system log did not have a ZWave error. No help. I did notice that there are 2 ZWave USB HW interfaces, tried both, with no different results. What am I missing?

[ScottBot]

Not sure. I've been able to run the z-stick gen 5 on my windows 10 machine. Maybe try installing the USB Stick Drivers from the downloads page.

[James D]

Hello Sirs,

First Scott, Thanks for the wonderful program, my setup has been running good for a long time. Just miner quirks due to me. LOL
I have been using Zwave light switches, but I changed about 1-1/2 to Sonoff devices (flash them with Tasmota) that use MQTT communication. They are way cheaper than my Zwave switches and more configurable. I made a MQTT broker from my old, old first generation Rasberry Pi, It all works using WiFi and if I need to extend the range of a device it is easy to get another router setup. I setup another Wifi network in my house, that is dedicated to my HB Automation. Just giving my 2 cents. But if I had to look at another protocol I would look at Zigbee