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If you or a friend wired your home to be "smart" with Insteon devices, they just folded
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/
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/
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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!
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ROFLMAO! Spot on!
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