Indigo Domotics

I have a bunch of X-10 appliance modules which I have no desire to replace for the functions they serve. Several of them turn aquarium lights on and off and for some time worked just fine. Something has changed, however, and they no longer respond to Indigo commands.

They are working and the circuits appear to be within "view" of the PowerLinc interface. I have experimented by plugging one of my old ControlLinc Maxi controllers into various outlets, and the appliance modules respond just fine to on and off commands. I've tried various modules and various addresses and they all respond to the ControlLinc, but when I try to turn them on and off from the Indigo server or from an Indigo Touch or HTML device, nothing happens. The Indigo interface thinks they are on or off and there is no error message in the log, but the modules just don't respond.

To verify that Indigo can "see" these modules, I plugged a LampLinc into an adjacent outlet and it was recognized and added to the database. Unfortunately, I can't use it because the aquarium lights are florescent and that module doesn't work with florescents.

Any thoughts?

Did you plug the ControlLinc into the same outlet as the PowerLinc? My guess is that because the signal paths are different from the ControlLinc to the device than from the PowerLinc to the device that that's the difference. Regardless, it's highly likely that there's some signal sucker that's keeping the signals from successfully getting to the X10 devices.

Because X10 is only 1-way, the PowerLinc can only send the X10 signal and hope that it arrives. By extension, Indigo sets the state of the device to on/off based on sending the signal only because it doesn't know if the device actually did respond. INSTEON has acknowledgements and retries if the device doesn't respond to the PowerLinc that it got the message.

This is why X10 can be quite unreliable and diagnosing issues is so hard.

Well, I figured it out. Remember I said they used to work but stopped? Well as I was thinking that through I remembered something else. In this thread (viewtopic.php?f=131&t=12343&sid=5207b791d4f97c8637d6b7ef77af00d7#p82738) I chronicled a problem I was having which I solved by using a filter device. It dawned on me that maybe these X-10 devices stopped working then, but because all the Insteon devices (which are far more numerous) worked fine I didn't notice this at the time and when I did see that some X-10 devices weren't I didn't correlate the two things.

But I put 2+2 together this morning and removed the filter. Of course the X-10 devices now respond. And the good news is the garbage on the line seems to have disappeared as well. I'm a little suspicious about that but I'll keep my fingers crossed that it doesn't return. So as usual your instinct was right when you expressed surprise that the PowerLinc worked when it was plugged into the filter.

Thanks

Ah, yes, that would definitely cause it since the 2413U doesn't send X10 RF signals, only power line signals. The filter would completely block those.

Another mystery solved!

And of course you were right all along.