
That earlier article set might be worth reading as this discussion unfolds. Years ago, when Insteon was the "new thing", I wrote a comprehensive article set that explained how Insteon worked and presented a step-by-step installation tutorial. Home Assistant is an application, often run as a separate guest environment running on a host, that allows different technologies to talk to each other in spite of the frankly obstructionist motives of their corporate creators. This is where Home Assistant steps in.To date there's no realistic plan to resolve this conflict.

To meet its customers' needs, home automation should have a shared, cooperative communications protocol, but this necessity collides with the equities market, where competition is everything.This refusal to cooperate results from the famously cutthroat American corporate culture, in which stock market investors see a given market segment as a zero-sum game, in which every Insteon customer is lost to Blink or vice versa.This goal would be much better served if different companies' system talked to each other, but that is just not so, in fact it seems the players do all they can to freeze out their competitors, refuse to cooperate by sharing technology or by agreeing on a common communications protocol.Home automation's goal is to drag a pre-technological household into the 21st century - automate and control appliances and lights, make them respond to their owner's whims, and maybe provide security as well.It may not be obvious why this business is so lethal to its players, but with a little thought, the reasons become apparent: The home automation business is a bleak landscape with many recent casualties: Charter/Spectrum, Connect, Iris, Revolv, SmartThings, Wink - and now Insteon. It's a free, open-source, widely used environment that can integrate home automation elements from different manufacturers into a coherent system that's easy to use and is much better than the original Insteon software.


The key to this rescue is called "Home Assistant".
#INSTEON TIMER SWITCH HOW TO#
In this article I'll show Insteon system owners how to rescue their systems, either by making their Insteon gear work again, or by transitioning to a different home automation technology, or both at once. Without warning the Insteon Website went dark and their customers found themselves cut off from some parts of their Insteon-based home automation systems. In mid-April 2022 the Insteon company abruptly ceased operations.
