Insteon is down and may not be coming back | Hacker News Reader

Insteon is down and may not be coming back

staceyoniot.com

70 pointsfortran7729 comments

Two days ago I noticed the Insteon app was unresponsive and my hub showed a persistent red light. Their support telephone numbers ring "busy" at all hours. Word on the web is they're gone.

Truly baffling to have no communication from the company -- even their status page insists systems are operational.

Many users are finding it easy enough to migrate to Home Assistant, but the whole experience leaves a bad taste.

I hope that the technology/patents land in good hands; Insteon's combo-RF-and-powerline tech has been incredibly reliable for the seven years I've used their switches and dimmers.

Edit: Also, really demonstrates the pitfall of having an app and local hub rely on third party servers over the Internet to work. Should be a total non-starter for IoT gadgets at home.

really demonstrates the pitfall of having an app and local hub rely on third party servers over the Internet to work

Yep. And it's happened before.

Before there was Homekit, I bought a bunch of "smart" light bulbs from Fiet Electric. Long story short, within 16 months, Feit decided not only to shut down the service, but uploaded firmware to everyone's home device controllers to brick them.

The company wouldn't talk about it. Wouldn't answer support queries. The best guess on the internet at the time was that the company got caught using someone else's IP, and that was the way out.

Amazingly, this company has launched new rounds of "smart" devices that are on sale today. How's that for bad "planned obsolescence" optics? They brick millions of light bulbs, then go ahead and sell new ones.

I had a Feit CFL bulb from Costco nearly burn down my home about 5 years ago. If we hadn't been home at the time it would have succeeded. I will never buy one of their products again.

Well given they went bust... don't worry about buying one of their products again :)

Feit Electric appears to be still in business. What do you mean "they went bust?"

That's unfortunate; I'm glad you were able to avert disaster.

I have well over 100 Feit LEDs (dumb ones) throughout my home and family's home, and they're actually my favorite brand, mostly because of their high-CRI offerings.

I’ve also started to consider FEIT as a higher quality brand. My house came with Philips LED bulbs, and over the last two years every one of them burned out before their promised EOL dates. All FEIT replacements have been working as expected so far.

As the price came down on LEDs, so did the quality. I have a dozen or so Philips bulbs from 2012 and 2013 that have had no issues and good quality dimming. Could not find same quality when looking for more a few years later.

Did it say something like “not for use in totally enclosed luminaries”? I’ve seen a few of them get melty in enclosed lamps. Also makes led bulbs fail much faster than people expect.

(Not blaming you or whoever installed it) it seems like one of those bad cover your ass disclaimers

This is one of the many reasons why I decided to go with bulbs that have Zigbee support. They can be controlled by other software. I bought a FEIT electric bulb and the app is terrible. Hopefully open standards like Zigbee and Matter win.

/r/internetofshit

These IOT devices are the ewaste disaster of our generation. How long before the consumer or the law stops this kind of junk from being made.

https://twitter.com/internetofshit too. Curent top tweet is a quote tweet of this:

'An investor told me yesterday that they were recently asked what the "web3 strategy" of one of their portfolio companies was. It was a smart oven startup.'

Doesn't mean there are no good uses of this technology, but the fact that my Bosch cooker hood is wifi-enabled in case, I don't know, perhaps I need to turn it on while I'm at the office, does suggest that this whole area could do with a serious reality check.

Helium seems like a potentially good web3/crypto implementation. I think it’s using LORa as the underlying tech.

I can't shill any harder right now for Hubitat: https://hubitat.com/

It's an IoT hub that functions totally offline, no cloud dependency (they do have an app but it's optional). It uses a built-in HTTP server. It's not as well known or as successful because it's a little more - scratch that - a lot more technical of a product but that's the price you pay. So if they go out of business you keep humming along.

Some are even intentional, like Sonos bricking devices to force upgrades.

I think everything should have an API to let you serve it yourself, eg from Home Assistant.

It's a real shame when protocols like zigbee and z-wave can offer exactly the same functionality without requiring any third-party services.

Well, ZigBee or zWave won't necessarily save you from a proprietary hub or from cloud-reliance. Though they most likely are better than many alternatives, including WiFi.

The IoT/smart home devices I've accumulated over the last decade are all still working just as well as when I bought them. In that time, I've gone through multiple TVs, HDMI sticks, laptops, phones and fridges.

I do think we need to work on more open protocols for IoT to prevent this kind of situation, but I'm not sure that ewaste disaster of a generation seems entirely warranted. Most people barely have more than an Alexa, if anything.

Matter got delayed but so far is the closest thing we’re getting to an open protocol

I wouldn’t characterize Insteon as this in the same way as most Alexa controlled WiFi stuff. My Insteon devices continue to work fine because I have the USB controller that works through HomeSeer completely offline and didn’t utilize their Internet services. Unfortunately, it is a proprietary protocol that did not get licensed broadly the way zwave has. While the communications were reliable and there was an enthusiastic base, they probably couldn’t compete against the cheap Internet of shit being pumped out to the Alexa crowd.

I always ensure any IoT devices (light switches, primarily) I purchase are of the ESP32 variety. There's a solid open-source firmware ecosystem around these chips (ie: Tasmota).

Thats fine, but Zigbee and Zwave are also good options, personally I love zigbee devices most of my home automation is zigbee

It will be interesting Matter will bring, I am on the fence as to if matter is actually an improvement to zigbee or it is will be used to force more Cloud Adoptions and less local control.

Many moons ago, Zigbee/Zwave stuff got spooked out of my head because the comms protocol was unencrypted, and anyone could walk by and start doing things to my devices. Has this improved at all? I don't like having every single smart device on my network talking WiFi either, but I can at least sandbox that stuff away to a separate network, and use things like HomeAssistant if I feel the need to go full paranoid android and limit external connectivity.

At least for Zigbee it was never the case, the encryption is there since the first version.

Newer versions of Z-Wave are encrypted for "secure" devices, which afaict is most of them. My door locks are all set up in secure mode, and in fact if they're not linked in secure mode they're read-only.

Which Z-wave hubs can I trust to still be working in the future? Is there some z-wave card or other hardware plugin I can DIY add one of my home machines, along with software to control and monitor. In 2016 my Staples Connect z-wave hub became a brick when Staples shut down that department. Now my Samsung 2019 z-wave hub is also abandoned by Samsung.

Hubitat will still be working. It runs 100% locally, and you don't need the cloud for anything. There is an app for remote access if you want.

And you can do remote access yourself if you are skilled with tunneling through your router.

Thanks. Hubitat looks good. I see it has MQTT [0] interface which makes it compatible with almost anything. OpenHAB for my case, and Home Assistant too. I think NodeRed support was available even earlier, which is also a good option.

[0] https://docs.hubitat.com/index.php?title=MQTT_Interface

You can also write and install drivers for anything you like. And you can also write apps for it.

And there is a huge community who does exactly that, for anything not provided.

Basically even if the company when under, you could keep using it by replacing everything built in with user installed stuff.

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