Insteon

Insteon is a technology from SmartHome. This powerline carrier technology enables excellent communications between devices, keypads, and a home automation system.

During the development of HCA we concentrated on Insteon. Our goal was to provide you with a set of tools to best deploy and manage an Insteon network. Insteon is supported by these features:

  • Visual Scene Editor - Rather than creating scenes manually, HCA provides a visual method to program scene controllers and scene responders.
  • Database capture - HCA reads the memory from your Insteon devices. This allows HCA to better understand the links between all of your devices. With that information HCA can keep its state up to date with your devices, have HCA show the connections between those devices, and provide tools to hunt down network linking problems.
  • Map for documentation of network - How are all your devices programmed? What happens if a device loses it's programming or breaks? With the Insteon Network Map you can see at a glance what controls and what responds.
  • Read existing Insteon network - If you have already installed and linked Insteon gear, HCA can read out the contents of a device and follow the links to locate other devices. This method then lets you create HCA devices to represent them. From an Insteon network you can quickly build a HCA design.
  • Device Replace - Replacing a device in an Insteon network is challenging. Not only does it have to be installed but it has to be reprogrammed along with all the other devices that link with it. This is a major job. HCA does it all for you with the Device Replace Wizard.
  • Network clean - It's easy to have linking problems in an Insteon network. If one device gets reset or you remove a device other devices that link with it retain their references to the now missing device. HCA can detect and remove those "missing" links.
  • Multi-Way wizard - While the Visual Scene Editor is easy to use, if you want to create a multi-way association - where each device controls all the others in the association and all respond to each other - HCA provides a wizard to do all the work for you.
  • HCA program triggering - Trigger programs from Insteon messages.
  • Design checker for Insteon devices - Since HCA has the linking databases of all your devices, it can look for and report on more possible error conditions.
  • You can directly control any device. On, Off, and Dim operations supported.
  • Status can be queried for any device.
  • You can create HCA program triggers based upon Insteon keypad or switch action.
  • You can use Insteon devices in HCA schedules and programs.
  • Using HCA power failure recovery, you can provide better control over individual devices than what the devices can do themselves.
  • Supports using the PowerLinc for legacy X10 sends and receives.

HCA supports the complete line of Insteon products from SmartHome and others. This includes the thermostat adapter and the multi-channel device types.

But while all this is great stuff, it's the bigger picture that is important. HCA supports multiple automation interfaces simultaneously. This means that with HCA you can bridge between the Insteon, UPB, wireless, and X10 worlds. All you need to do is attach a wireless interface, an X10 interface, and a UPB interface and HCA can receive and transmit to each type of device and provide the bridge you need.

Do you need to use motion sensors to control Insteon devices? No problem! HCA can receive wireless motion sensor transmissions (using the W800RF32) and then transmit commands to the Insteon devices using the PowerLinc.

Do you have some X10 devices, some Insteon devices, and some UPB devices? HCA can receive commands from Insteon keypads and run programs to send commands to X10 and UPB devices. HCA can receive X10 commands and transmit Insteon commands. HCA could have programs and groups that manipulate all of these device types.

Using HCA, a fully functional automation solution can be built from those components that you need - choosing the best parts from all the automation worlds.

A few notes on the 2414 and 2413 Insteon PowerLincs:

HCA can use the PowerLinc to send and receive both Insteon and X10 commands. X10 support is, however, not as good in some areas as other X10 interfaces. What's not as good? Two things: Dimming for the oldest type of X10 devices - LM465 - and those devices that use extended command sequences - the LM14, AM14, and some Leviton devices. If you have many of these devices and you also want to use Insteon you may want to consider using the 2414U for Insteon and a CM11 or LynX-10PLC for X10 commands.

HCA doesn't support downloading of schedules and programs to the PowerLinc memory.

Insteon support is in Standard and Plus flavors of HCA.