HouseBot

support for Insteon is a must in my book

Any updates on INSTEON support?

I really envy you 110V 60Hz guys. this Insteon thing looks great... However i just got the reply from smarthome that it will not/never support 240V 50Hz... .

i hope this will clear things for us european guys even if its not a good message...

(if anyone have another view on this i am more than happy to get it on the forum...)



regs walle

Count me in as interested in Insteon support.

Insteon please!! And. ... well, some support for HouseBot would be nice. Has anyone heard from a Meedio person at all?



Jakar

Yes, I heard from Pablo and INSTEON support is still a ways off.

I'm new to this forum. Trying to get feedback on Smarthome/INSTEON products before I make any purchases, etc. Among other things, I'm looking into their Keypad Linc. Any experience with that, opinions to share, etc.?

Thanks.

I just got the Insteon starter kit and I am very pleased. I live in a two bedroom apartment. X-10 signals would never make it from the living room to the back bedroom and were unreliable in the middle bedroom. Now with Insteon, everything works perfect! That leaves me with only one problem: Please add Insteon support to HouseBot!!!!!

AccessX10 wrote:Yes, I heard from Pablo and INSTEON support is still a ways off.

A "ways off" is at least some point that it will definately happen though? I'm a meedio pro user and haven't dived into housebot yet, though I've been extremely interested in setting up INSTEON. I can't afford it right now, so I guess it's actually rather convenient that it's not supported just yet. Seems a lot of software won't support it fully until 2006 perhaps anyhow, so I'm not in any rush.

Here's an alpha versionof an Insteon plugin for HouseBot, if anyone is interested.

Dude, awesome! Now I need to order the Insteon PowerLinc and play with it. Looking forward to trying the plugin. Thanks!

OK, I've ordered the Powerlinc and should have it in a week or so. I've installed the plugin and see only the dimmer listed. Do you plan on adding controller and keypad support? They're both pretty integral to the whole Insteon idea and I'm sure most of us would like to see that before any X-10 support. I have both, so if you need a guinea pig let me know.



Thanks again for the plugin!

Rob

pavlov70 wrote:Do you plan on adding controller and keypad support?

There are two approaches you can take when developing a device plugin. You either create individual devices that have names that correspond to the equipment that they are associated with and give them specific properties that are to control and monitor the particular piece of equipment, OR you take the quick and easy way out (like I did) and create one device that can do it all. In the future, it may make more sense from a usability standpoint to create individual devices, but for the sake of testing and considering the amount of time I have to put into this, the single device should work fine.



So, my thoughts are that if you want to monitor specific keypad or controller commands, you just create a HouseBot device for the address(s) that you want to monitor. When the keypad button is pressed, it will send a command that will be registered in the HouseBot Insteon Switch property and you can execute a task based on the data received.



I actually don't have a keypad device (although I have one on order) so I'm just assuming they work similar to the X10 ones where they just send an On/Off/Dim to another address. If the behavior is different, then I may need to add more support.



Since you have the equipment and know more about it, if you don't think this will suffice, please let me know, more specifically, what you would like to see.

Thanks for the reply. I'll have to re-read the Insteon white paper, but I don't think the keypads and controllers have unique ID's for each button. If they do, they aren't printed on a sticker. Perhaps it has to be queried via the Powerlinc and the still un-released Smarthome Manager software.



I'll play around with things when I get my Powerlinc and will share my findings.



Regards,

Rob

I posed my question over at accessx10.com and here's a reply I got concerning addressing of the buttons on the keypad:

As I understand the white paper docs, keypads and controllers use a single device address for all their buttons, but use a different "group" number for each button. Does the Housebot plugin allow for different group numbers?

I'm awaiting confirmation, but I'm thinking the group number is simply 1-5 for the ControLinc, 1-6 or 1-8 for the KeypadLinc depending on how it's configured. If this is the case, would it simply be an issue of asking for a group number along with the address when adding a device?



Thanks,

Rob