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thewayneThe 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/
no subject
Date: 2022-04-20 05:40 am (UTC)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