Interface Setup
I bought a PowerLinc and a W800RF32 from Norm at funforgeeks.com, and added my own old Keyspan serial adapter for the W800. Connect them up, install the drivers, Indigo sees everything no problem. This is why I love Macs.
Device Setup
I managed to do this without copying any Insteon addresses from the devices. I linked the PowerLinc to a SwitchLinc, which made the Insteon address show up in Indigo's event log, then made a new device with that address. (Bug: I had to unplug the PowerLinc after getting the address but before adding the device, otherwise the PowerLinc would be in a weird state and not get a ping response.) During setup, Indigo also reveals (in the event log) the addresses of all devices that are linked to the device you're setting up. Because of this, and the fact that many of my devices are already interlinked, I only had to manually link about 4 devices in order to set up all 24. To streamline the somewhat clumsy and slow initlal setup process, it would be nice if Indigo captured the Insteon addresses as it became aware of them and offered to set them up for you in batches.
I can see right away that keeping Indigo in sync with the Insteon links is going to be an issue. A single "update all links" command would be really helpful here, I think. (Even if it does take 30 minutes!)
It would certainly be nice to have more Insteon maintenance functionality in Indigo, such as the ability to set up and manage native Insteon links. However, this does seem like it would be a substantial amount of work, and end up bringing Indigo into something of a Smarthome Device Manager clone for the Mac. I don't know if that's where Perceptive wants to take this or not (sales through Smarthome?), and it's really their decision. I do have a Windows PC that I wouldn't mind using for maintenance tasks like these, once Smarthome Manager is available. (oo, I see the alpha is on the developer site, I should have looked for that before.)
Action Setup
It took some time to understand Indigo's control paradigm, and it still feels a little clumsy--I have to set up an action group in a different pane if I want a trigger to do more than one thing? Even if that action group is only ever used by that trigger? But what's really important is that I was able to set up everything I wanted to, including interesting things like zoned motion detectors, where any motion detector in the zone can reset the countdown for the entire zone.
I am a little concerned that each trigger can only have one condition attached to it; I know that there are some tricks you can do with programmatically enabling and disabling actions, but this feels really kludgey. For a future version, something like the Finder's search interface, where you can add and subtract multiple conditions (and actions!) would make me feel a lot more comfortable. Also, more powerful control over variables (set to an expression?) would be nice.
I love the event log, but because of all the motion detectors and actions, it gets kind of busy. A "high-level" event log that only contains configurable entries would be appreciated. For example, I'd like to see a log of only Insteon commands and selected actions.
Remote Access
The Indigo dashboard widget is sexy, but it is unusably slow if you're connecting to a copy of Indigo on a different machine and doing anything more complex than setting a single light or executing a single action. Several seconds to actually perform a command, then several more seconds to update the status. I didn't even show the widget to my WAF because it was embarrassingly slow.
I hadn't originally planned to install them, but the PHP Web control scripts are much better. The page reload after every command also really cuts down on usage speed, but being comfortable with PHP and HTML, this will be easy enough to hack a workaround for. Some Javascript that does an asynchronous status reload and lets you fire off lots of commands without the entire page reloading would be really nice for the future.
As far as widget speed, I suspect that making the widget interface to a PHP script would work better than the remote Apple Events.
Surprises
I was disappointed that sending multiple Insteon commands in an action group isn't as fast as controlling a group from a regular controller. I understand now that this is a little complex with Insteon, because you have to set up extra Insteon links between the PowerLinc and the devices in the group, but I think this is something Indigo should do. Even without that, though, it seems the commands are much slower than the 50ms Insteon claims to be capable of, more on the order of 800ms per command. I understand it may not be possible to actually fire 20 commands per second with the latest PowerLinc, but I still think we can do better than one command per second. (There are some tips on the Insteon developer board about this, though I haven't looked at them.)
I was pleasantly surprised that Indigo is able to see Insteon commands sent from other devices, and more importantly, that triggers can be made from these external commands. I was even more pleasantly surprised that I could assign triggers specifically to double-taps; this addresses one of the few advantages I saw in UPB over Insteon--the ability to assign more complex actions to standard switches.
In the same vein, I wasn't expecting the PowerLinc to see X10 commands on the powerline, pass them to Indigo, and then have Indigo let me trigger actions on those commands. This easily addresses one of the things I was uncertain how to approach: Getting simple IR commands from a universal remote into Indigo, for things like "media system in use" and basic lighting control. I just plugged in a basic X10 IR receiver, and set up triggers on it in Indigo. Awesome!
Summary
Thank you, Matt, for getting this beta out. It works well, and I'm glad to be able to connect all this stuff together. Barring any unforseen explosions, I'll definitely be buying my copy of Indigo when the demo expires, and I also look forward to buying future versions with improved polish and remote access capability.
