If you or a friend wired your home to be "smart" with Insteon devices, they just folded

[thewayne]

The worst thing that you can do right now is a factory reset of your hub. DO NOT DO THIS! It has to contact the company's servers, and they are gone. You'll brick your hub and at that point you now have a paperweight.

The company folded Friday with no warning. The CEO wiped his Linkedin page, no one is responding to direct emails or social media posts. They are gone. Anything scheduled through their servers no longer works. The only good thing is that their light switches are physical devices and should work.

Also a good thing is that their protocols were reverse-engineered and can be made to work with other systems like Home Kit.

An honorable company would have given a month's notice that they were shuttering, but that clearly did not happen. They just wiped the servers, turned out the lights, and walked away, literally leaving their customers in the dark. There's no doubt a number of their former customers will reset their hubs in hopes of getting things working and will crash their systems, which is a shame. The hub contacts the former company's servers for an identifier key or something, and since that is no longer available, the hub is going to sit there waiting forever, and you just wiped out your configuration with the reset.

There's information in this Ars Technica article pointing to resources to convert your system over to other vendors to keep your home functioning. It's really a shame because it was cool tech: they combined 900 MHz wireless mesh with power line networking, which is kinda neat. But in the end, they did not survive and just walked away.

But people will be watching for the CEO's next venture, and will hound him about his previous one....

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/shameful-insteon-looks-dead-just-like-its-users-smart-homes/

Comments

[dewline]

You hear about horror stories like this on occasion from Spark...mind you, Nora Young and her team are focused on medical devices that are designed to "phone home"...

[thewayne]

I sent this to a friend of mine who does some home automation: and this is the system he uses at his home in Mexico and at his mom's in Phoenix.  He tried to order some new switches from their parent company and was told they weren't available due to the chip shortages.  He's not happy, but at least it should still keep working as long as he doesn't have a hub failure and now he knows he need to do some system replacements.

[disneydream06]

Thank goodness I prefer my stupid house. :o
Hugs, Jon

[richardf8]

As smart as my house gets is a fully self contained Leviton Astronomical Timer for the porch light. No IoT, no smart switches, no Internet connections for appliances.

[thewayne]

Ditto.  I have my router and my Apple TV and our various devices.  No intelligent light switches, even my TV is dumb.  I will not own a TV that plugs into the internet!  I posted something, probably last year, that Vizio made more money selling info to advertisers harvested from their smart TVs than they did from the TVs themselves!

[kaishin108]

That is spooky! Ewww. I have Roku, dratz.

[armiphlage]

In the acronym "IoT", the "S" stands for Security.

[thewayne]

ROFLMAO!  Spot on!

[disneydream06]

Not sure I have that much smartness. LOL.....

[lilysea]

Thank goodness I prefer my stupid house. :o

I prefer stupid houses too,

but smart houses can be an accessibility issue -

eg for my friend R who for Disability reasons can't get out of bed to turn her bedroom lights on/off

or to open/close her curtains

or to turn her heating/cooling on/off

[thewayne]

I definitely agree there are perfectly valid use cases for home automation.  I intend to keep my lodgings as unintelligent as possible for as long as I can.  I played with automation when it first came out: BSR X10 remote dimmers.  Very fun stuff, I love light dimmers.  At that time, and this was late '70s, early '80s or thereabouts, the problem I had was the control modules were VERY sensitive to power spikes and would pop at the least issue.  Now I just have a bedside halogen lamp with a rheostat. :-)  And that thing is probably 25-30 or more years old, come to think of it. In the last year I've replaced both my washer and dryer, and it was a bit of a challenge avoiding things that wanted to be connected to WiFi!  But I succeeded.  That's something that I definitely don't need.  And refrigerators connected to the internet?  I need to look inside and see if I'm low on milk?  Well, since I can't see inside a carton, that doesn't really tell me if the carton is nearly full or nearly empty, it just tells me if I have one or more cartons, which I would know when I had breakfast in the AM, in which case I knew then how much milk was in it. sigh

[disneydream06]

That does sound very good for your friend. :)

[thewayne]

Ditto!  My remote control is nothing beyond asking Russet to turn on or off a light. :-)  That, or do it myself.  I suppose the TV remotes are a remote control.  A friend of mine has THIS EXACT MODEL!  On both his house in Mexico, where he lives, and on his mom's house in Scottsdale!  But they're not using Insteon's hub or cloud features, so their systems will continue working.  He's going to make plans to eventually swap out key components with another controller, but he's got plenty of time to do it. He told me about how he has his mom's house rigged, it's pretty awesome.  If the motion detectors sense any movement outside the house after she goes to bed, ALL outdoor lights come on simultaneously.  It's scared away more than one prowler, plus numerous coyotes.  It turns off all the house lights after she goes to bed, turns them all back on before she gets up and off after sunrise.  Does a lot of spiffy things.  But me, personally, I'll stick with manual switches.  And these two installations are not connected to the internet, so they're safe from outsiders.

[silveradept]

This sort of thing is the reason why I always am after local control of all devices that are visible to my home automation brain without needing to access a cloud API or service. If there were a way of extracting the local control key without needing to register something on a website, that's even better. That way, I can outlast the manufacturer when the manufacturer inevitably folds before the devices themselves have died.

[thewayne]

A friend of mine wired his and his mother's house with this particular brand's equipment.  However, he's not using their controller nor their cloud access, and was not affected by the shutdown, so he got lucky.  Another demonstration why cloud and monoculture is risky.

[silveradept]

Indeed. Beyond the lock-in problems, I think the easiest and biggest situation where people realized their situation was going to change, and not for the better, was when Google bought Nest. And yet, even after that, we still have these situations. Even Home Assistant has a cloud option, but it's not integrated in so tightly that if they stop the cloud option, Home Assistant stops working. They made it local first, and that's the most interesting thing that I like about it.