A new day for Insteon | Hacker News Reader

A new day for Insteon

insteon.com

230 pointsfortran7741 comments

For those missing context, Insteon is a smart home company that shut down suddenly a few weeks ago without notice to it's users, essentially bricking peoples smart homes.

Good for Ken and the team to take this on. I'm not an insteon user, but I hope one of the first tasks they take on is to either open source the servers, or update the system to be able to work offline, should they decide to kill the service in the future.

The lack of concern for it's users and the way Insteon was shutdown probably had a large negative impact on the smart home industry. Thanks to these dedicated fans, it hopefully has a happy ending

wow, this is so absurd from my point of view. i am glad my home is not smart.

You do realize the worst case scenario for this stuff is that the house is no longer smart right?

I'd feel worse about the wasted time and money.

sunk cost. you got to enjoy the smart home for some period of time, just not forever. yea its totally annoying, but its not wasted entirely.

Many people I know with smart home stuff enjoy the tinkering a bit, and find its another thing to be restless about and fiddle with, and don't "set and forget" anyways.

If I spent a lot of time and money making something and someone else immediately broke it I’m not sure I would be as satisfied with the experience alone of having invested time and money in it as you, but I have to say theres something to be said for having that incredible level of optimism and ability to stay positive.

It'd be a bad investment. E.g. spend money to smarten up your home and enjoy living in it for the next, say, 20 years, vs. only enjoying it for a year because hey it's a cloud service that's died...

A worse case is when you spend effort to make it smart, made decisions that rely on being smart, and then it suddenly becomes not smart at some point.

No, it works fine. You just could not remotely control it from outside the house. I didn’t even notice.

> You just could not remotely control it from outside the house

And what about disabled folk who might rely on the smart functionality of the house to have something resembling an independent life? Or the elderly? Even if e.g. a smart bulb fails gracefully and becomes a non-smart bulb in the absence of the cloud, it doesn't help if you have cannot operate a normal light switch effectively.

A lot of comments on this article seem to think smart home devices are only for the lazy or are toys for people with more money than sense, but there are plenty of "legitimate" use cases as well.

Also, while I would never want to use it myself, relying on the cloud is perfectly valid - the simple fact is most people are incapable of hosting and maintaining their own smart hub [1], and Insteon fucked up big time by not having a better transition plan.

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ The source is paywalled, but this article is a decent summary. TL;DR if we assume running your own smart hub is a "level 3" task, only about 5% of people in a country would be capable of doing so.

> And what about disabled folk who might rely on the smart functionality of the house to have something resembling an independent life? Or the elderly?

Again, the house just becomes non-smart. What about them? You can't say "I prefer dumb homes because smart homes might stop being smart" "Yeah but then they just become dumb" "But what about people who can't have dumb homes?"

That's not an advantage of a dumb home, it just sucks for people who rely on something when the something stops working.

It reminds me of the standup bit where no escalator should ever be "out of order". It should just say "escalator temporarily stairs". I've got some smart lights, but worst case, they still have a lightswitch that works.

Also being left with ewaste, and money you have spent on a product that can no longer be used.

No, you can still use all the switches. A light switch that turns lights on and off isn’t ewaste.

It is e-waste if you still want smart switches, and if they were smart until yesterday then your revealed preference on that point is pretty clear?

The worse case scenario is your smart home leaving online signals such that crime rings are aware when your not home, or more/worse.

No, worst case scenario is that the house has no contolls at all. Lights permanently on or off while brain dead switches are locked up trying to talk to servers that are no longer there.

Note this isn't what happened in this case, but it is a worst case scenario.

So Insteon hardware works fully offline. It's a RF and powerline protocol, and they sold computer USB or serial adapters to interact with it.

People who got screwed were only people who chose to use the Insteon Hub, which is their specific cloud/Alexa/Siri/phone app solution.

So most of the hardware was unaffected and the users dependent on the cloud chose to be.

Insteon hardware actually exploded in value when the company folded just because you could only buy second hand. PLMs were going for $400 on eBay. Because all the hardware is offline and still works fine, there's just nobody manufacturing it.

Yeah that shit rocketed up in price fast. My dad was trying to get some spare components for his system (can't remember if it was the ISY or the PLM[1]). He ended up bailing out of the bidding at $700. Not sure if he managed to luck out on a cheaper one since then.

Definitely good that he refuses to use any cloud-centric home automation, so nothing was directly affected by Insteon's sudden shutdown. But still he was rightfully worried that pieces of the system would need replacing over time. He's already had to fix a few switches by replacing bad caps, but not every problem is so easily serviced

1: Edit - Couldn't have been the ISY. I forgot that was made by another company

I believe I have the USB adapter that's fully wireless, not dual-band... somewhere... as a backup for my PLM, but definitely looking forward to resumed manufacturing. There was rumor for years about an improved PLM model too that never shipped, hoping we hear about that.

Accurate.

"For those missing context, Insteon is a smart home company that shut down suddenly a few weeks ago without notice to its users, essentially bricking [=ruining, making inoperable] people's smart homes.

Companies like this have no concept of open source and no concept of offline. To them, your home is their home, to traffic so as to maximize their bottom line.

> For those missing context, Insteon is a smart home company that shut down suddenly a few weeks ago without notice to it's users, essentially bricking peoples smart homes.

Thank you. Some variant of this surely would have fit in the actual description :(

I have a whole house of this stuff. We are talking 100s of plugs, lights, sensors, etc. I picked them because they have been around forever - like 30+ years (started with the X10 stuff) so I hoped they where a safe bet. One day everything stopped working, the remote control part via the application and automation that depended on their Hub being online. I had the hub. Ugh. Okay I had the USB serial adapter also sitting around. Installed Homebridge with the "Homebridge Platform Insteonlocal" plugin on an old PINE64 board. Used it to delete the links to the old hub and connect everything to the USB serial modem (the "modem" keeps the DB of the things it can talk to). Everything works great again and I can even use Apple HomeKit. I received an email today from Ken saying they are going to do the right thing but they need to move to a subscription model for like ~$40 per year. I am fine with that in the sense they should have done that a long time ago to sort their $$$ issues. At this point I am going to stick with the local solution - remember the HomeKit stuff gives me remote access - that the hub+app gave. The HW itself it really decent and always has been. It would be great if it became available again. I am worried about something failing at this point as the eBay pricing is crazy town right now. The 8 button remote that was $30 is going $200+. The remote links to their wireless protocol and pairs locally with all the devices. You do not need anything online for it to work. To be clear - they have powerline protocol and wireless protocol that allows devices to be paired (or more then a pair) with each other locally and locally programed. It is really cool stuff given it is 20+ years old and just works.

X10, now there’s a name I have not heard in a while. Shortly after college, I had planned on X10-ing up my whole home for really no good reason other than it being neat and I had watched a video series (pre-YouTube, dvd) on controlling it programmatically. Life happened and I never got around to it. I’m glad I didn’t now lol, I’m sure I’d still have that junk around the house.

I moved into a very old house about 25 years and there was a distinct shortage of light/outlet switches. I got a bunch of X10 gear which I used for a while. Over time most of the electrical was redone so I mostly didn't have a need for it any longer. (I still have one set of lights in the bedroom that don't have a switch but I switched that out to an Alexa-controlled plug a few years ago.

Similar story here. I started with X10 and upgraded to Insteon because of the X10 reliability & communication problems. I never bought a hub because I did not like being dependent on Internet services to control my house. I do have a few PLMs and a bunch of remote control units that I'm not using, and probably will never use, so I'm going to list them all on eBay! Thanks for the tip!

Insteon made great hardware, but I recently discovered Lutron Caseta and now I like them better. Their switches do a much better job with LED lighting. (No flickering.)

Good for them. I don't use any of their products, but I'm rooting for them

Huh. This comes suspiciously after Home Assistant/NabuCasa rolls out their insteon integration.

HA has had some form of Insteon integration for close to a decade. But I think a lot of the improvements in it recently has been to help new migrants from the Insteon Hub market cope.

I set up Home Assistant for my parents after their Insteon system turned into a brick. It did a great job of controlling everything, but it seems to think there's an extra sunset at 4:17PM every day which has made scheduling a challenge.

The recommended way to automate based on sunset/sunrise is to use sun elevation. That may solve your issue.

I’d be happy to share some yaml from my setup, if you like

This is good to know, and now that you say it makes total sense.

Can you share that yaml?

Looks like I replaced most of what I have with blueprints, though here’s an example of a simple blueprint that just turns something on at your specified sun elevation:

https://gist.github.com/CyanAutomation/1b8bafd033f73e3c24e42...

Important bit is near the bottom, the trigger and condition sections.

It’s possible you could find a blueprint that replaces whatever you were trying to do on your own, too.

Thanks!

What is the suspicion?

I wonder how much the acquisition was

It is sizeable enough that another company interested in it, Universal Devices (which makes a hub that can interact with Insteon devices) bid for it and lost.

But it's also a former VP of the old company who has apparently bought it, so I am kinda interested in the story of how that happened.

The amazing thing about insteon is that it does not need a central controller. The devices have relationships with each other (that you can setup by tapping the wall switches themselves).

I actually stopped using a central controller years ago and just appreciate being able to turn off everything in the home from my front entry.

My PHP-controlled home cinema uses the Insteon Hub locally, so it kept working after the abrupt shutdown. I was worried about having to move to a new home automation system as parts died (I'm on my second Hub in seven years). Overall, it's been a really reliable system with decent dimmers and plugs so this is good news to me.

I've thought about open sourcing it but I'd ideally like to do it in a way where it can't be monetized by a third-party. That's a post for another day.

Cinema in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7YEVGWJjvI

I got an email from them and the plan forward is to charge annual subscription for cloud services at $40/year or $70 for 2 years.

This is great news! As a former customer, I wish the new owners all the best luck possible.

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