Glad OpenHab exists, should be nice and fun and work with alexa/google. Hopefully you havenāt factory reset your Insteon hub, because then youāll have to go back and re-add all of your devices by their IDās (this means pulling out all of the light switches and reading the labels, fun right :)? Read more about how people did that by viewing previous posts.
On another note, a lot of the older Insteon hubs (who knows if theyāre still selling defective ones) had problems where they would stop working (the company would send you a free replacement, but now that theyāre out of business, they wonāt be), supposedly something to do with a bad capacitor - but more likely a design issue that causes the capacitor to blow. It hasnāt been researched enough. So what iām saying is, if you have an older hub, you may want to get a new one if you have a lot of Insteon devices so it doesnāt randomly stop working. You may also not want to invest in other gear as you might not be able to get replacements for it when it breaks anymore. Now that Insteon servers are shut down, and trust me, theyāre not coming back, youāll probably want to use OpenHAB, even though there are other options, this is the most logical, free option.
From the research that iāve done, the Smarthome/Insteon CEO, CIO, and COO have all removed Smarthome and Insteon companies from their LinkedIn profiles. They are likely trying to avoid bad PR for just turning the lights out on all of their loyal customers without any warning. Also, if you google āInsteon,ā it says, āinsteon was a technology company,ā past tenseā¦ This is a complete slap in the face to anyone who has even a couple of Insteon devices. Some people have over 30 devices, imagine how they feel. The president (Rob Lilleness) who owns Insteon is now investing his time and money into a new company called Nokia Smart Lighting by Smarthome, trying to hide his past with what he did to his loyal customers at Insteon. Read more about that by clicking here. Iām sure none of us will be buying any of those products after what he did with Insteonā¦
I see that OpenHab has some sort of Alexa integration so hopefully nothing will change for me (except non-local, away from home control, which sucks, but is not the end of the world). If anyone has already gone ahead and set up their Insteon Hub with OpenHab, could you please share in detail all of the information needed, Iāve seen some scrambled posts above but a comprehensive guide would be really good. We are a community and we can all help eachother. If no one makes one, I will eventually get to making one. I am especially ready to work on the alexa integration, iām sure openhab also has google home assistant integration, so maybe someone can create a guide for that too. Itās probably not all that hard, but itād be nice to hear from someone who has done it before.
Hereās a thanks to the helpful community we have here at openhab, and a big fuck you to smarthome/insteon for leaving all of its faithful customers in the dark!