I’ve been planning to redo my insteon setup using altsteon for a while, but I’ve been cringing at the thought of manually linking all my devices to the PLM. (e.g. I have at least 20 inlinelincs in various hard to access places behind electrical fixtures). Are there any plans to eventually allow insteon devices to be added using the insteon ids, just like the regular insteon support allows you to, or does that result in less of a link that then becomes the reason that bidirectional stuff doesn’t work well?
My grand plan is to have support for just about everything. That would include linking. In fact, most everything is already implemented in the daemon, it is just a matter of exposing it through the UI. I have not figured out how I intend to expose linking yet, which is why it isn’t available through the UI.
Assuming you are okay working on the command line level, linking can be done without touching each device. (Battery powered devices will always require touch, but things like inline-lincs shouldn’t.)
Another detail to be aware of. The linking happens between the firmware of the devices themselves. So, links that were created with the Vera implementation don’t need to be redone for Altsteon. The only time that may become a problem is if the Vera doesn’t link in both directions. If that is the case, then you will only need to add those links.
I’m fine with doing things at the command line - that’s actually better than a UI if you ask me 
… Are there instructions somewhere for how to do it?
I also didn’t realize that linking things via the vera native support could also be an option. Does vera ever link things in both directions? (Other than for I/O lincs, status information seems pretty unreliable with the native insteon. I assumed that might be due to the lack of proper bidirectional links?)
Thanks!
I’m not sure how the Vera sets up links since as soon as I realized that bidirectional communication didn’t work I moved on to working on Altsteon. Interestingly enough, even though the developer documentation suggests links in both directions, a lot of stuff works fine with only a single link. So, you may want to just try with the links that the Vera has already set up and if something doesn’t work, you can go back and add links in the opposite direction.
All of the commands you can run are listed in the altsteon_instructions.txt file included in the tarball you download from my web site.
The dump_aldb command will let you see what links are defined. So, from the cli running “xx.yy.zz dump_aldb” will show the link database for the device at address xx.yy.zz.
Linking devices is a little weird. If is different if you are linking something to the PLM, or linking a device to another device.
For device to device, you enter the command “xx.yy.zz enter_link_mode 1” on the device you want to be the controller, then enter the command “zz.xx.yy enter_link_mode 1” on the device to be the responder. The “1” in the command is the group number you want that link to be assigned to.
To link a device to a PLM, the order that you enter the commands isn’t important. You will decide which is the controller and which is the responder based on the command to the plm. That said, I usually do the PLM first. To link to a PLM, enter the command “plm start_all_link 0 1”, followed by “zz.xx.yy enter_link_mode 1”. The first number in the plm command tells it if it should be a controller or responder. 0 is a responder, 1 is a controller. The device that you enter the “enter_link_mode” command will be the opposite of what is defined in the PLM. So, in my example, zz.xx.yy will be a controller because we told the PLM to be a responder. The second number in the command specifies the group to add the device to.
A “full link” is where devices A & B have two links. One is the controller, the other the responder. (So, A is both a controller and responder of B, and B is both a controller and responder of A.) Not all devices will let you build full links. My Thermostat adapter refuses to take on the roll of a controller, so all I can do is set up half links.
Hope this helps.
Awesome – thanks. I will give it a try and see how it goes. (No idea why the forum isn’t letting me know when you respond, hence the slowness of my own responses … )
On a related note, something else I’m curious about now, in case you know the answer. I have a fairly large insteon setup using the vera native support. If the PLM dies, does that mean I’m stuck manually recreating all the devices in vera, as the insteon links are presumably gone with the dead PLM? Does altsteon make this any better? (If the altsteon linking is scriptable, this time around I’m going to set it up such that I’ll be able to rerun the script to recreate all my links in the event of a distaster … )
Thanks!
I’m bring back an old topic…
I have added some code for manually linking a brand new device to the PLM. If someone else (that has a dev environment) can test this, I can add it to the repository for others to use. I only have recent version of devices, so I have no older items to test against, so I am not wanting to check it into SourceForge right now. It did involve a change to the “enter_link_mode” command, and I didn’t want to risk breaking that. If there is a desire to post it to the repository anyway, I can do that…just know that enter_link_mode now use extended commands, and I don’t know how that works on older devices.
So far, I have it “mostly” working with:
- Dual-band LampLinc
- Dual-band SwitchLinc On/Off and dimmers
- Dual-band Relay KPL
- PowerLinc Dimmer KPL
Sometimes I have to do it twice. Maybe my order is backwards. This code is pretty rough, and currently has some values hard-coded.
From the cli, you can use the following (maybe do it twice, and remember to replace AA.BB.CC with your device ID):
plm link_new_device AA.BB.CC
This takes 10-15 seconds, and links the device to the PLM, and the PLM to the device…both links use group 1, which is enough to turn switches on, use dimmers, etc.
After you link, you will want to use:
add_device AA.BB.CC
After that, it should work as if you had done the button presses yourself.
If you have KeypadLincs, and want to associate another button to the PLM, use the following:
AA.BB.CC enter_link_mode <BUTTON>
plm start_all_link 0 <BUTTON>Replace “” with 2-8. Repeat for each button you want.
Is the “dev environment” something available to people other than the 4 or so that I’ve seen listed as helping out with development these days?
[quote=“worried_guy, post:7, topic:173170”]Is the “dev environment” something available to people other than the 4 or so that I’ve seen listed as helping out with development these days?[/quote]Anyone can download the code, compile it, modify it, etc.
Getting it to run on Vera is tricky, but getting it to run on a Linux box or a Mac is easy.
Only a small number of people have “commit access” which means only those people can check in changes and patches.
I checked in some changes. See my new thread:
http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,15693.0.html
Oh, cool. I had missed the “Open sourcing altsteon” thread because it had scrolled off the first page of the forum, so I didn’t know the source is on sourceforge. Awesome!