Musing on Insteon Model Names

I observe some oddities and inconsistencies in how Indigo reports model names for my devices. I'm passing along some observations and a gentle suggestion for possible cleanup.

Example 1: I noticed that I had Instances of "TriggerLinc" and "Open/Close Sensor" for seemingly identical devices. I found that if I did "define and sync" operation, that the apparently obsolete "TriggerLinc" name went away and the devices magically transformed themselves into Open/Close Sensors.

This made sense as SmartHome had apparently changed the name, and I was glad to know that Indigo seemed to handle the situation reasonably - i.e., it did not gratuitously change my existing devices, but when given a chance, it brought my devices into a logical and consistent state.

Example 2: I have KeypadLinc devices of various ages and they show up under names "KeypadLinc Dimmer", "KeypadLinc Dimmer (2334)", and "KeypadLinc Dimmer (2334-222)". My first assumption is that similar to the previous example, maybe these were just created at different times and re-doing define-and-sync will make these differences go away. I try this and as a result one of the three labels goes away (KeypadLinc Dimmer 2334-222). But strangely, I am still left with two different labels for similar devices.

Example 3: (Admittedly, now I'm being picky and just looking for more examples.) I observe that i have "LampLinc", "LampLinc V2", and "LampLinc (dual-band)". Oddly, the "LampLinc V2" devices are older than "LampLinc" ones.

Example 4: while many device types seem to indicate when a device is dual-band in the name (e.g. "LampLinc (dual-band)"), others do not - for example, while I'm 99% certain that some of my keypadLincs are new enough to be dual-band, the "(dual-band)" designation does not appear on any of them.

Sometimes, I'd prefer to have a smaller set of device types - for example, when I'm writing a script or something and want to filter on a device type. Other times, I'm browsing my database and want to find all devices of a particular type, and I can select All devices (i.e., no group) and then sort by "Model" and like devices sort together, aside from the exceptions that I've noted above.

I know there can be small differences in behavior across different versions of a device - if it is the intent to represent every distinct device model or even firmware version, then maybe just include model (and firmware) in the name uniformly and be done with it. I have Insteon Motion sensors of widely varying ages and I know they have subtle differences in capability, yet I observe they are called exactly the same ("Motion Sensor"), which is fine.

To me, it makes more sense to have a smaller set of device types. Then just have things like firmware version, model # variants, and whether or not a device is dual-band be separate device attributes which can be queried via IOM API for those rare cases where they might matter. Maybe deep in the bowels of Indigo, there is good reason for Indigo to treat "LampLinc" and "LampLinc V2" as two distinct device type-id's, but it still seems to me like it would be generally cleaner for both of those type-id's to have the same externally-visible string name (i.e., LampLinc) and just use different version's (which they already do).

Does any of this really matter? I admit, probably not that much. Just a suggestion to make Indigo a tiny bit cleaner and simpler to use and understand.

[matt (support)]

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions. I believe most of the inconsistencies come from changes in how Smarthome has named models over the years. I believe we've corrected some legacy model names (like your TriggerLinc example) but haven't scrubbed through the entire database. So naming can be inconsistent as you noticed. As to the varying capabilities, unfortunately there are a ton of different model IDs and firmware versions within each model ID. Further complicating things is that sometimes model IDs are changed with no end-user capability difference (sometimes for a region specific device, other times for no discernible reason), yet in other cases there are differences based only on a firmware change. Lastly, I don't believe anyone has any type of master list that explains all the differences. Basically, aside from a few small tweaks I don't see Indigo's Insteon model naming conventions changing anytime soon. Another reason not to make changes is because, as you mentioned, there are existing scripts/plugins that make assumptions about the naming and any changes might introduce bugs.