Insteon Hub dead

For those of you using the Insteon hubs, it appears that they're dead, with no communication to the servers.
I've seen a ton of posts about this on reddit.
Anyway, I was curious if this could get more people on to Indigo, as a few of the posters wanted something to patch their system until they could replace all the Insteon stuff.
Is there any hack that allows Indigo to use the hub?

[jay (support)]

Unfortunately no.

If you are handy with a soldering iron it appears there may be a way to mod a hub to become a USB PLM using a FTDI breakout board.

I would assume someone will eventually post the mod instructions if successful, if I had a hub I would attempt!

Then it could potentially be used with Indigo.

Is this an issue with the hub for indigo or the hub that is sold by Insteon - different than the one used to interface indigo - just wondering —- I have a neighbor that uses the standalone Insteon hub so wondering if I should let him know about the smarthome company fold in case he is down….

It's the "Smart Cloud" ethernet hub, 2242 or 2245-222 that is affected, seems Smarthome may have gone bankrupt and turned off the servers that it communicates to.

The (dumb) serial/USB PLM 2413S/2413U that Indigo uses is unaffected.

Yet another reason I won't install any device that relies on the "cloud"!

That is what I thought was the issue - thanks for confirming - my set up (using the dump usb hub) is still working too....

So, for those of us who see this as a moment to phase out our Insteon devices … what comes next?

I’m looking to transition to this new “matter” standard, but the rollout of that has been delayed?

Any idea if I Diego is going to wot with these new “matter” devices?

Always a chance someone or some company will want to buy the line and continue it but I would not bet on it. Z-Wave is all we got for the moment - my problem with z-wave is the battery drain is typically much more than my Insteon devices. I have so many Insteon leak detectors & open close sensors that go years on 1 AA battery - the z-wave stuff (even the newer stuff) seems to eat batteries. I don’t want to run around the house constantly replacing batteries and lots of stuff is not co-located with any power (for me).

Maybe someone smarter than me has some good ideas - or maybe I should start a post where we can all list z-wave devices that have issues or list items that are great (by category).

[jay (support)]

So, for those of us who see this as a moment to phase out our Insteon devices … what comes next?

There are a lot of options. We recommend Z-Wave given that there are dozens of vendors making hundreds of devices.

I’m looking to transition to this new “matter” standard, but the rollout of that has been delayed? Any idea if I Diego is going to wot with these new “matter” devices?

We're watching Matter closely, but yeah, its been delayed a couple of times. We will continue to monitor, and when it looks like it's more than just promises and when the API has become stable, then we'll have the information we need to figure out where it fits in. In the meantime, there are a TON of alternatives to Insteon, including a lot that are supported via plugins (RadioRA for instance).

[jay (support)]

Always a chance someone or some company will want to buy the line and continue it but I would not bet on it.

Yeah, I wouldn't hold my breath. The Insteon technology is well past it's prime, and is the likely reason they were not able to close an acquisition/buyout.

Z-Wave is all we got for the moment - my problem with z-wave is the battery drain is typically much more than my Insteon devices. I have so many Insteon leak detectors & open close sensors that go years on 1 AA battery - the z-wave stuff (even the newer stuff) seems to eat batteries. I don’t want to run around the house constantly replacing batteries and lots of stuff is not co-located with any power (for me).

There are alternatives to Z-Wave, available through plugins. However, I have some Fortrezz water leak sensors that have run for a couple of years on a single battery. I have some Zooz multisensors that have been running over a year, so I can't say I share your experiences with battery drain.

I’m sure there are many z-wave devices that work great - I have way way over a hundred devices and it does not take too many of them needing batteries frequently to become very annoying. That was my point of everyone possibly working as a team to weed out the devices that are under engineered and like I said I can name a few…

It's true that there are many companies making Z-Wave devices, which is good, but I have an impression that at their core they all have SiLabs chips. If that's right, it's a similar single-point-of-organizational-failure. Can anyone speak to whether that's correct - are there secondary sources of the internals of Z-Wave products?

[jay (support)]

SiliconLabs purchased Z-Wave from Sigma Designs. At that time, there were 2 companies manufacturing Z-Wave chips. I don't know what the current state is. I believe Silicon Labs basically open-sourced the protocol (which Sigma Designs guarded with litigation) so that it was easier and more free to implement, but they may still be the only ones making the chips.

Having said that, Silicon Labs is a HUGE company that makes a ton of stuff and is quite invested in IoT - so it's much less likely that they will abandon/EOL Z-Wave any time soon, and will almost certainly have a better strategy for it moving forward than did Insteon.

I have not done a deep dive into that but just from following (from interest) I can say there are lots of devices that are at least several generations old that are still for sale. I should check to see if they are all the same base HW. I have devices as old as gen two and lots of gen 5 - also have items that say they use the 700 series chipset. If anyone has a tech article to help everyone understand the whole picture please post. I do think (based on my observations) it is not only the z-wave chipset but also either the supporting architecture and / or supporting code that can make or break how “good” a z-wave product is.

Example, I put in a gate switch that was new HW just 6-7 weeks ago - the other day I got a battery notification at below 35% - now, it was cold that day but it does use a litithum battery so I don’t expect it to be affected by temp that much. So, is it a case of poor design that leads to battery drain, or does the code report improper levels or something else?

By the way - in case you are wondering why I say code could be the issue - I have another device that does just that - reports very low battery when the battery is way over 50%.

I have checked this out and it is happening - would a firmware update fix it? I don’t know and firmware updates are way too much of a hassle in Indigo to implement / figure out - life is too short. I can provide more details if anyone even cares….