Sure. I can’t speak much to Z-wave as I only have 2 Z-wave devices. However, from looking at the forum, there are Z-wave devices that don’t report state either. The key difference between that and Insteon is Insteon devices all report state, but the native Vera code doesn’t know what to do with it.
At the lowest level, Insteon is at least as “event driven” as Z-wave is. The protocol specifies calls to poll the device, and messages that indicate the state of a device has changed in some way. With the exception of the I/O Linc, the Vera seems to ignore the state change events.
An Insteon light switch seems to be a pretty straightforward example. If you put a switch in to your Insteon network, configure it in the Vera with the native Insteon code, and flip the light switch from on to off while watching the Vera UI, you will notice that nothing changes. After some period of time, the Vera code will poll the switch, see that it has changed, and update the UI. However, the length of time that it takes to do that can be several minutes. This becomes extremely problematic if you want to have that switch trigger something else. The trigger won’t fire until the Vera polls the device and notices the change.
Using the native code, there doesn’t seem to be any code that you could write to really fix this issue. You could probably hack something up that would increase the frequency of the poll, but things still won’t react as fast as they would if the Vera was trapping the event.
So, why do I say this probably isn’t a big deal for the devices you have listed? The Vera seems to pay attention to the events from I/O Lincs. So, it is likely that the Vera will catch the state change when the photobeam is broken. Because of this, any triggers that you set up will probably be executed fairly quickly. For all other devices, the state is only updated when they are polled. However, this probably isn’t a big deal for the in-line linc because those are generally used in a place that you can’t install a normal switch. As a result, you probably won’t be able to push the buttons on the in-line linc, which means that the in-line linc would have no reason to send any events that the Vera would ignore. In general, you would be driving the in-line linc from the Vera itself, so the Vera would keep the current state of the in-line linc by virtue of the fact that it is the one sending the commands.
That said, the in-line lincs do have buttons on them to turn them on and off, just like a normal switch. (It just doesn’t have the decora paddle on it.) So, if you expected to be able to push the on or off button on the in-line linc and have it trigger something, you will be disappointed with the results.
However, as garrettwp has mentioned, I have written an alternate Insteon implementation for the Vera. That implementation listens to all of the events that make it to the plm, processes them, and updates the Vera UI. (As well as supporting many devices the Vera doesn’t. Like the EzFlora and Garage Hawk.) So, if you get these devices hooked up with the native implementation, and it doesn’t work how you want, there is another option. However, it does take some Linux cli interaction to get it working. But, if you are an engineer, that probably isn’t a huge concern. (I am making some forward progress to getting my implementation in the app store, but it is probably still a couple of months out.)
