The DMZ - Latest Comments

Re: So What’s Going on with Insteon?

iansmithca — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 21:24:31 -0000

I am certainly optimistic at this point (2023). The new owners of Insteon are doing a fantastic job of bringing Insteon back to us and of improving the product line and the experience.

Re: Home: On #148 – A Disgraceful Exit with Seth Johnson

Justin Spooner — Sun, 08 May 2022 18:29:22 -0000

Insteon users look at Home Assistant

Re: Home: On #148 – A Disgraceful Exit with Seth Johnson

Alan Wynn — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 12:36:44 -0000

While you can say they did not give warning, Insteon have been giving warnings about it status for years for anyone paying attention. As recently as a year ago Richard Gunther was still advocating buying their products despite all the warning that they were dead. No product updates, no new products, dropping support for HomeKit, etc., should have been warning signs for anyone paying attention. It is sad that they died, as they had some pioneering products and some that still have not been matched by others, but given their failure to do simple things to embrace the hobbyist community (like making their protocol documents readily available, open sourcing their software, making it possible to purchase their chips to enable building specialized devices, and so on), or update their software to improve their user experience (making it easy to create link groups for keypads, as an example), it should not surprise anyone. While it is unlikely, I would love to see someone buy the tooling for their keypads and offer a version that was Matter (or just HomeKit) compatible and maybe offered more configuration options (using the wide caps to offer four button, five button, six button, seven button and eight button versions).

Re: Insteon Raises the Curtain for the Next Act

Richard Gunther — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 12:35:25 -0000

Michael, you've undoubtedly heard the news by now that Smartlabs has gone out of business with no notice to customers. This is disappointing news to many customers and to me personally. You may want to look into one of the options I mentioned in this other comment, but note that all of them will require some additional hardware—a new interface, hub, or local server of some sort.

Re: Insteon Raises the Curtain for the Next Act

Richard Gunther — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 15:43:23 -0000

After years of community speculation, we now know that Smartlabs didn't make it. I always remained optimistic. After observing years of stagnant product evolution and broken promises, I was encouraged by what I saw when I visited their offices in 2019. I even provided some product and copywriting consulting support to their efforts on the refreshed app and Nokia Smart Lighting products. It's easy and convenient for companies to point at the pandemic, and surely it's played a role in any company sourcing product for resale, but I feel like there's way more to this than just that.

The Insteon user community has been one of the most passionate and supportive I've encountered over the years. I hope those who still enjoy and value their Insteon products can find new life for their systems through Homebridge, Home Assistant, OpenHAB, Hubitat, or one of the many other systems starting with an "H" that offers support for Insteon's various hubs and interfaces.

Re: Home: On #148 – A Disgraceful Exit with Seth Johnson

Scott D Davis — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 20:38:02 -0000

regarding INSTEON: i confirmed the demise by reaching out to a (former) Programmer from INSTEON on Linkedin who 100% confirmed the company has shuttered. He also said that there were 1000's of Nokia switches in stock, but never offered for sale. You are right, there has been no company statement made yet, but the employees that just lost their jobs are giving up the ghost.

Re: Insteon Raises the Curtain for the Next Act

Michael Healy — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 13:34:46 -0000

Has Insteon officially gone belly up? I’m an electrician/installer and have at least 50 customers calling me asking what’s going on? My house is all Insteon as well. I’m not sure I’ll be able to find a direct replacement in most of my customers budgets. Has Nokia Smartlabs lighting also been shelved? It’s unfortunate that it has come to this. The dual mesh communication technology works far superior vs standard RF wireless protocols. What is the best option moving forward. There has been no warning from Insteon or Smartlabs that they would shut down Insteon’s servers and no articles explaining what happened. A lot of people have been left with thousands of dollars of useless equipment. This is horrible

Re: How to Change Alexa’s Default Music Service

cpuiulet — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 12:47:37 -0000

Unfortunately Amazon and Google are still at war. YouTube Music can't be made as the default music provider when you ask Alexa to play music 👎 you get way more media with YouTube Premium than with Amazon Music or any other providers. So Amazon can suck it. Good thing is that both Amazon Echo and Google Home are cheap as heck. So you can have both for half the price of Apple's whatever they call their assistant 🤣😂

Re: Tablo Launches 4K ATSC 3.0 OTA DVR

Dadrepus — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 10:03:58 -0000

See, here you go, you mentioned the price! Great job.

Re: WiSA SoundSend Review

Dadrepus — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 10:02:40 -0000

Why don't you mention costs in this article? Why do I now have to search the internet to figure it out? Click throughs? Come on, I would like to see 1) What it costs as well as 2) comparative packages with different speaker manufacturers.

Re: What Will and Won’t Work with the New Insteon App

Alan Wynn — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 08:25:32 -0000

Anything but Insteon. This is a dead product from a dead company.

Re: Insteon Raises the Curtain for the Next Act

Alan Wynn — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 08:22:22 -0000

Another year goes by and still nothing really new. Has Insteon joined the Matter consortium? When was their last press release? Any HomeKit support? Anything?

Re: WiSA SoundSend Review

Luxferro — Mon, 27 Dec 2021 23:19:40 -0000

No mention of the sound experience, or a comparison to Axiim Q...

Re: Smarten up Your Gas Fireplace This Winter

Ryan Copeland — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 21:54:25 -0000

It should be a regular wall switch. Mine was. Replace with whatever smart switch you prefer.

Re: How to Change The Windows Store Download Location

Alonso Jiménez — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 09:02:35 -0000

Thank you, I did it real quick :)

Re: SmartThings Debuts SmartThings Edge

Wayne Emerson — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 19:37:00 -0000

So when is it out?

Re: Use a Lutron Pico Remote with HomeKit

Joe Black — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 16:03:29 -0000

Thanks! I want to exploit this hack just so I can replace my Hue remotes with Picos that fit my decora gang plates. I currently use Google Home. Do you know if it's possible to connect the Lutron and Hue bridges to HomeKit and Google Home at the same time?

Also - given that this post is a few years old, just wanted to confirm it still works?

Re: SmartThings Debuts SmartThings Edge

Josh Lyon — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 17:05:08 -0000

Nice summary, Jimmy! Thanks for sharing your insights as always. 👍

Re: Insteon Raises the Curtain for the Next Act

Trent — Sat, 10 Jul 2021 15:48:13 -0000

Something just doesn’t add up here. The Article above comments about how there were issues prior to the new CEO taking over. In my experience with Insteon / Smartlabs / SmartHome they were very proficient under their former CEO / founder Joe Data (sp?). The current CEO should get a failing grade in how to take over a business, communicate well with your loyal customers and provide insight (even if there is no news and they need more time to get the future products for the company going)…. A cynic would say that he is purposefully trying to dump the current installed base to start fresh and go after new customers. If that is true it’s another failure.

Re: How to Change The Windows Store Download Location

Sol D — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 23:14:07 -0000

This is actually a 1/10 action by Microsoft. It barely scratches the surface of what gamers need from their game files. Just moving it to another drive deals with disk space, but how about Drive organization? I dont want my games in a windowsapps folder. Also modding is impossible without a complete change of folder ownership which is a hoop i will jump through even with the risks involved. Windows store is almost worse than Uplay.

Re: So What’s Going on with Insteon?

Justin Jarrel — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 01:16:24 -0000

😂

Re: These Routines Make It Easier To Control MySmartBlinds by Voice

Jason Roy — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 11:25:27 -0000

The fact that it can be controlled using your voice makes it so much easier. I would suggest you get Blinds Installation done as soon as possible so that the privacy of the house is not affected.

Re: Ecobee Forces Customers To Enable New Eco+ Features

David Munn — Mon, 10 May 2021 22:28:39 -0000

Ecobee no longer works the way I want it to. I've just noticed this in the past few weeks. I thought it was Eco+, but I've disabled all Eco+ features on my Ecobee 3 and I still don't have control of my system. It's spring in Minnesota and I'm trying to go as long as I can without using heat or cooling. So I try to turn off my system, but it comes back on. I try to set a hold at 58 degrees "until I change it," and a while later my furnace is running when the inside temp is 67. Just before bedtime when I really don't want it coming on. I'm going to contact Ecobee support, but I'm really frustrated with this situation.

Re: So What’s Going on with Insteon?

iansmithca — Wed, 05 May 2021 16:05:46 -0000

So this post was two years ago and I haven't seen much change. Richard, are you still optimistic?

Re: How to Change The Windows Store Download Location

Andy Wallace — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 09:22:03 -0000

Thanks for this. Microsoft never make it easy. This helped me sort it out.
The method that worked for me was the part on "Updates for Windows 10 April 2018".