Featured on “Home: On #038 – Insteon Revisited, with Paul Braren”
April 20 2022 Urgent Update - Insteon ceased all sales and service operations abruptly in mid April of 2022, as covered by arstechnica here. Their abrupt closure left customers without access to their hubs to change any settings, myself included. While smarthome.com hasn't been taken offline yet, I would not recommend ordering anything. This shut-down has been confirmed by Insteon, see @danwroc's tweet linking to insteon.com/news2022. It's also not quite as bad operationally as it first seemed, with my own home's sunset/midnight/sunrise programs all still running fine, at least until the next Daylight Saving Time change on November 6 2022 here in the US. There also might be some paths forward to keep the installed hardware going, see details in My Hub is now offline thread on reddit, where rszostak writes:
Folks just to clear up a few things, the issue with the servers being done impacts the Insteon App which uses the Insteon servers to process the requests from the App. The timers are actually stored on the hub thus the reason those still work but you need the App to make changes so we are screwed to make changes as long as the Insteon servers are down, the Insteon App is effectively dead. However the good news is the hub can still be used with software that runs locally and does not rely on the cloud.
This is a shameful example of poor company behavior, and of the risk taken when investing in gear from any cloud-connected IoT device company. Such stories hurt the IoT industry as a whole. I'm glad that the prospects for some level of local Insteon device control may make the pain felt much less keen that it would be for other sad story endings such as Wink, and hopefully I can keep my dozens of Insteon devices away from landfills for at least a little while longer. All my local light wall toggle switches will continue to keep working, and a while back I moved from Insteon leak and smoke sensors over to the monitored service of (Amazon owned) Ring Home Security System.
Article as it originally appeared below.
June 2013:
I had the opportunity to talk about my home automation tinkering with my CES 2012 friend Mike Faucher, over on his podcast, BYOB Episode 125 “Home Automation”. Another guest on that very same episode was Richard Gunther, from The Digital Media Zone. Very grateful for that opportunity.
We all had good fun reminiscing about X10, then the joy of being free of X10, and finally, the potential future of Insteon, in each of our homes.
August 2013:
My next brush with the DMZ crew was with Craig Scholle, during my first ever Google Live Hangout on Air, doing a First Look at VMware ESXi 5.5, live. Pretty special to keep meeting DMZ guys, as I've long respected their home theater and home automation website and variety of podcasts.
September 2013:
Along came the chance to actually meet the DMZ guys, Josh Pollard, Richard Gunther, and Craig Scholle, over at The 3rd Annual Home Server Show Meetup in Indianapolis. They are part of the reason I bought the plane tickets to join the fun there, and it was quite the good time. Hats off to Home Server Show's David McCabe for building such a friendly community of enthusiasts.
We all had way to much to talk about, with far too little time to actually do so... which leads me to...
November 2014:
This time around, I was delighted to be invited by Richard to join him on his very well produced home automation podcast, Home: On
Home: On is a show focused on the connected home and home automation topics for the enthusiast and do-it-yourself communities. Every other week, we run through industry news, take a closer look at interesting products, share project ideas, or present topics for information and education purposes. Host Richard Gunther is joined by a rotation of co-hosts and guests from the industry, including consumers, industry experts, and executives from companies offering smart products of their own.
Richard is extremely well-informed and insightful. We quickly found a lot to talk about, including our fondness for home automation projects/hopes/dreams. Oh, and a bit about our mutual TiVo Roamio and home theater experiences. It's quite the honor to be on the air with somebody who takes audio production to new levels of professionalism. Richard regularly draws titans of the burgeoning home automation field to his podcast.
As a kid, particular on snow days, I'd do the the dorky thing, calling radio stations and making song requests. That was actually a thrill, when you heard your favorite song on the air, introduced by a human DJ who was not Ryan Seacrest. Being on this show felt a little like that, but greatly amplified. Recording it was super fun, and hopefully it turned out to be entertaining and informative for you. Please drop your comments below.
Podcast details, including RSS feeds, download, and shownotes, over at:
