Lutron RRA2 and Insteon integration

Posted on
Tue May 17, 2016 6:02 pm
FlyingDiver offline
User avatar
Posts: 7189
Joined: Jun 07, 2014
Location: Southwest Florida, USA

Lutron RRA2 and Insteon integration

Split off from the main plugin thread:

RatRanch wrote:
FlyingDiver wrote:
Also, I've got a pair of Insteon Lamplincs in our bedroom. I want to control them both an Insteon miniremote (those are direct Insteon links) AND with a pair of Lutron keypad buttons. I have a hodgepodge of triggers watching both for Insteon on/off messages and LED on/off changes to keep the state in sync. It seems very fragile and the lights sometimes turn on or off for no apparent reason. Mostly it seems to be because the LEDs change state unexpectedly. Any suggestions on a better way to do this?


Replace the Insteon remote with a Pico and the Lamplincs with RA2 plug-in dimmers. :lol: :lol: :lol: Seriously, you might want to start a new thread with this issue and give us some specifics about your triggers.


If I needed a longer term solution for the nightstand lights, I'd probably do that. But we're temporarily using our old plug-in lamps while DW is still looking for hanging lights. The ceiling boxes for the hanging lights are already wired into a pair of circuits in a Lutron WPM. But until we have those, I'm trying to make the Insteon controlled lamps act like they were on Lutron dimmers. :)

Besides, I don't think I can get eight-button Picos. And I really do need on/off for more than two devices. At least one if which is (and will remain) Insteon. Yeah, I could get the Lutron tabletop keypads, if I was willing to spend that much. Which I'm really not.

Right now, I have the two buttons set as toggle device, one going to the real dimmer in the WPM, one going to a dummy (no installed device) dimmer, just to see if the system acts differently. Each of these buttons has both keypad button and keypad LED devices in Indigo.

I have an Indigo trigger for each button (not LED) device, but it's not doing anything. When I press the button, I get the following debug output:

Code: Select all
Lutron RadioRA 2 / Caséta Debug Message received: ~DEVICE,45,4,3
Lutron RadioRA 2 / Caséta Debug Received a Device message: ~DEVICE,45,4,3
Lutron RadioRA 2 / Caséta Debug Received a keypad button/LED status message: ~DEVICE,45,4,3


Action 3 is button press. This should trigger my "device onOffState becomes On" trigger, but doesn't.

I previously tried to trigger on changes in the LED state. This worked, sort of. It failed because the LEDs would turn themselves off for no apparent reason.

Any ideas?

joe (aka FlyingDiver)
my plugins: http://forums.indigodomo.com/viewforum.php?f=177

Posted on
Thu Jun 08, 2017 3:29 pm
RatRanch offline
Posts: 68
Joined: Sep 25, 2013

Caseta Users: Information Request

Hi all,

(This is also cross-posted to the RR2/Caseta thread)

I'm working with a user whose Caseta Smart Bridge Pro does not connect with Indigo (it fails to get past login even though the correct credentials are provided). This issue has been reported a couple of times in this forum.

When the user opens a telnet session to the bridge, the first login attempt always fails and the second one succeeds. The first login also fails via the plugin and the plugin doesn't have logic to try a second time.

My initial conclusion was that this user's bridge was acting abnormally so I arranged to borrow it for troubleshooting (I do not own a Smart Bridge). Here's what's interesting: I was able to reproduce the first telnet login failing on my test network, however, the plugin communicates fine with the bridge in my setup. I tested with multiple versions of Indigo and the plugin and have not been able to reproduce the user's problem.

Question to others running the plugin with Caseta: if you log into the bridge via telnet, does it always fail on the first attempt? Perhaps this is just an incompatibility with the MacOS implementation of telnet and all bridges will react this way. I would like to rule out the possibility that there is something "different" about the bridge that I'm testing with.

Question to anyone else who would like to comment: why might this symptom be occurring on one Indigo implementation but not another? Timing? Network traffic? Something else? Any ideas appreciated.

Cheers,
-Jim

Posted on
Thu Jun 08, 2017 4:19 pm
roussell offline
User avatar
Posts: 1108
Joined: Aug 18, 2008
Location: Alabama

Re: Lutron RRA2 and Insteon integration

I don't have the hardware but happy to help with the troubleshooting.

When you say it fails on the first attempt - is it failing to connect to the telnet server on the hub ( a timeout-type problem), or is it rejecting the login credentials? Also, you mentioned it fails 1st time on a test network but works as expected on a "prod" network: Are these physically separate networks, and if so what are the differences between the two? Also, did you power off/on the unit when switching networks?

Edit: one thing that comes to mind - and I'm not sure how you'd check this if there is no command shell on the hub, but... Telnet servers typically perform a reverse DNS lookup of the connecting client at some point during the negotiation. It's conceivable that if the client doesn't have a reverse DNS entry in the DNS/DHCP server (if the client IP address is static, perhaps), the telnet server in the hub may be timing out. It could also be an ARP caching issue - if the Indigo server has both wifi and Ethernet connections to the LAN, if could be causing a routing loop that is freaking out the telnet server in the hub.

Terry

Posted on
Sat Jun 10, 2017 7:29 am
RatRanch offline
Posts: 68
Joined: Sep 25, 2013

Re: Lutron RRA2 and Insteon integration

roussell wrote:
I don't have the hardware but happy to help with the troubleshooting.

When you say it fails on the first attempt - is it failing to connect to the telnet server on the hub ( a timeout-type problem), or is it rejecting the login credentials? Also, you mentioned it fails 1st time on a test network but works as expected on a "prod" network: Are these physically separate networks, and if so what are the differences between the two? Also, did you power off/on the unit when switching networks?

Edit: one thing that comes to mind - and I'm not sure how you'd check this if there is no command shell on the hub, but... Telnet servers typically perform a reverse DNS lookup of the connecting client at some point during the negotiation. It's conceivable that if the client doesn't have a reverse DNS entry in the DNS/DHCP server (if the client IP address is static, perhaps), the telnet server in the hub may be timing out. It could also be an ARP caching issue - if the Indigo server has both wifi and Ethernet connections to the LAN, if could be causing a routing loop that is freaking out the telnet server in the hub.

Terry


Thanks for your insights Terry. It was failing to accept the credentials on the first login attempt even when the bridge was directly connected to the computer. Second time always worked. It turns out that the bridge's rudimentary telnet server doesn't play nice with the MacOS implementation of telnet.

I couldn't reproduce this problem from a Windows computer. So I ran a packet trace to see how the Mac and Windows telnet clients were different. Windows just opens the connection and waits. But Mac attempts to negotiate several connection parameters by sending several lines of text after connecting, e.g., terminal type, line termination, echo, etc. My guess is that all this extra information causes a buffer overflow in the bridge.

Although this symptom appeared to be similar to the problems the user was having with the plugin, that turned out to be a subtle bug in the plugin code.


Cheers,
-Jim

Posted on
Sat Jun 10, 2017 9:07 am
roussell offline
User avatar
Posts: 1108
Joined: Aug 18, 2008
Location: Alabama

Re: Lutron RRA2 and Insteon integration

Glad you got it going Jim!

Terry

Page 1 of 1

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests