Having said that I would like to describe a feature request that would take Indigo with regards to INSTEON devices to another level.
INSTEON Scene Management
Right now (as of 6.x) Indigo supports the vast majority of INSTEON capabilities, including managing individual links from controllers to responders. Scene management is a level up from link management.
INSTEON is a very slow but fairly reliable communication protocol. The more devices one has to address the more you need to watch how much traffic has to travel to the various devices. For example: Turning on 10 individual devices with individual commands will take several seconds. Dimming these devices in sync is only possible through the concept of links/scenes in INSTEON.
An INSTEON scene links controllers and responders directly together and allows a controller to send a direct command to all its responders. Through a fully designed INSTEON scene, 10 even 100 individual devices can be controlled completely in sync.
Here are two examples that I have implemented in various locations of the house (am heading towards all rooms):
- IMG_6533.jpg (369.67 KiB) Viewed 3949 times
- IMG_6527.jpg (467.83 KiB) Viewed 3949 times
Keypad Links are a nice usability enabler that allows users to leverage the home automation without having a remote or smart phone in their hands. Especially my wife really only started to accept the HA system, once she could see the scenes she wanted to activate in the rooms and through out the house.
As you can also see in these examples, various locations also leverage a radio button setup for Home (Green) and Away (Red).
The 6 button and 8 button keypad links are excellent drop ins for existing switch boxes. Cannot get lost, permanently powered and located where one would assume to find a switch.
One particular drawback of Indigo is the limitation of only being able to link to one devices of such a Keypad for a single scene. That basically prevents the use of the dimming function of the keypad link itself when it also needs to be part of a scene that is also on a button of the same Keypad.
In order to manage scenes significantly easier here is the request:
First of all the limitation of mapping to the load and a button at the same time needs to be addressed. Not sure if this needs to be 1:N mapping. Other controllers manage it through extending the INSTEON address with the channel/button number.
24.69.32 becomes 24.69.32.1 for a regular devices and 24.69.32.1, 24.69.32.2, 24.69.32.3, 24.69.32.4.... for a Keypad link. hat way each button has its own virtual address and the controller converts that to the actual INSTEON address needed for the protocol.
Next it would be great to define scenes rather than individual links. The UI could allow a user to select all the responders and controllers of a scenes and auto create all the required links for that. Every scene needs to also auto create a Powerlinc Scene as well as all links between all controllers and responders. A scene with 4 controllers and 6 responders (10 devices total) requires 1 PowerLinc Scene/Group, and 6+4 links per controller - in this example this ends up being 40 device links plus 10 PLM links (Powerlinc group). Changes in dim levels or ramp rates need to be manually edited in up to 50 places for this sample setup.
In other words the UI would only need to define a total of 10 devices (4 controllers + 6 responders) and all links and groups could be managed completely automated by Indigo. Combined with the ability to link to loads and buttons at the same time, this would make hours of editing a job of a few minutes. Even more so if 20-30 of such scenes need to be setup and maintained, hundreds of individual links need to be clicked at one at a time for any change.
This feature would really make Indigo much more powerful and would leverage some of the strengths of the INSTEON protocol.
Until this feature has been implemented I am unfortunately stuck with the ISY994 as these scene setups are simply not possible or highly unmanageable within Indigo.
Hope this is helpful.
