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Shameful: Insteon looks dead—just like its users' smart homes
The app and servers are dead. The CEO scrubbed his LinkedIn page. No one is responding.
The entire company seems to have abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking users' cloud-dependent smart-home setups without warning. Users say the service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying, "All Services Online." The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media.
[....] Insteon is (or, more likely, "was") a smart home company that produced a variety of Internet-connected lights, thermostats, plugs, sensors, and of course, the Insteon Hub. At the core of the company was Insteon's propriety networking protocol, which was a competitor to more popular and licensable alternatives like Z-Wave and Zigbee.
[....] With its servers down, the Insteon app appears worthless, and users' automations and schedules have stopped working. Many of Insteon's wall switches were actual electrical switches, so the worst that will ever happen is that they become dumb switches.
Every dark internet cloud has a cat 6 lining. This isn't as bad as cloud connected pet feed fooders no longer working. Or cloud connected exercise machines not working or restricting features with new pay walls. Or Smart TVs spying on you and displaying ads during a live sporting event.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19 2022, @11:29PM (5 children)
Any chance that the Internet Archive has a crawl of the server? Librarians are known to be very resourceful, but I don't know if they have gotten quite good enough to make a working copy of something like this...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snotnose on Wednesday April 20 2022, @07:21AM (1 child)
What good will that do? They had a proprietary protocol, scraping their server isn't going to get that implementation.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday April 20 2022, @04:00PM
That's a solid "kind of"
Its reverse engineered and licensed elsewhere so the headline is kind of like saying if Nokia went bankrupt a headline saying "3G is no longer in business".
The other issue is the protocol generally had two architectures:
The IoT scam where you have a cell phone app and a centralized server and a hub thingie that connects to the centralized server so you can use the on/off switch on an app, sometimes they even do scheduling usually not. I believe the insteon servers had scheduling (I never used them)
The other architecture is you buy a PLM instead of a hub (power line modem) and the protocol is reverse engineered decades ago (like in 2005) and Misterhouse or HomeAssistant running your own server connect to the PLN and control your stuff. I had this in the mid-late 00s to mid 10s using misterhouse and later (currently) homeassistant. This does not involve internet servers and will continue to work "forever" assuming your hardware never fails (as its mostly been out of production since late 10s).
I've moved almost entirely to zwave, it was a gradual process and when my last appliance module converted from 00s era insteon to 10s era zwave I chucked out my PLM, which I regret as half a decade later I'm hearing they go for $500+ on ebay (probably false rumor). PLMs used to cost $49.
I think it would be worth a screen scrape to "acquire" all the .pdf files explaining how to configure and program individual hardware devices (press this button for 3 to 7 seconds to enter pairing mode etc).
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday April 20 2022, @01:29PM
Also, think of the Internet Archive as a historical database. Sure, it may have archived a downloadable file. It will not provide a functional service. Since that requires more infrastructure than a snapshot of their website.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by drussell on Wednesday April 20 2022, @01:57PM (1 child)
I think you fundamentally misunderstand either the capabilities of the archive.org efforts to save static copies of parts of the web, or how these silly "everything as a cloud-based service" type of "services" actually operate, or more likely both of those.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 21 2022, @12:52AM
archive.org is a little more than static copies, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive [wikipedia.org]
> The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge".[notes 2][notes 3] It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books.
I would not be too surprised if they start collecting IoT related material as well. I added the bold above.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Tuesday April 19 2022, @11:29PM (11 children)
No, it was always worthless.
But there will be another company that does the exact same thing and idiots will flock to it and get raped all over again.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday April 20 2022, @01:11AM (9 children)
"But there will be another company that does the exact same thing and idiots will flock to it and get raped all over again. "
You talkin' about Microsoft!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday April 20 2022, @02:54AM (8 children)
I have been fascinated by these "Lutron" home automation devices since Veritassium spoke of them.
However, like everything since the X-10 controllers, I have been holding back on purchase and adoption until I understand their communication protocols.
This story details exactly why I do not trust proprietary crap. If I can't use an Arduino to control it, I really don't have any use for it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by EJ on Wednesday April 20 2022, @03:38AM (6 children)
All of the Insteon stuff is very well documented. The people who are freaking out are the luddites who don't know how things work. They just want things to work without understanding them.
I have an Insteon hub and all sorts of switches. This outage doesn't affect me at all. Well, it sort of did. I had to pull out one of the Raspberry Pi boards that was gathering dust to set it up as a bridge to a new Android app to control my hub remotely. I had already written my own simple PC program to control my lights from my laptop and other PCs around the house. The only thing from Insteon I was using was their crappy phone app, but not very often.
You can control the Insteon hub via simple http commands that are well-documented online.
If you don't want to use the hub, you can download the 410 page developer's guide that has all the gory details of the protocol here: http://cache.insteon.com/pdf/dev-INSTEON_Developers_Guide_20090218.pdf [insteon.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Fluffeh on Wednesday April 20 2022, @04:20AM (4 children)
Looks like a great opportunity to throw up an open-source project on github (or whatever your platform choice is) and get people to add their own updates/fixes/etc/whatever seeing as you seem to have done a good part of the hard grunt-work already.
(Score: 5, Informative) by EJ on Wednesday April 20 2022, @05:12AM (3 children)
There's already much better stuff already out there like https://www.openhab.org/ [openhab.org]
What I wrote for my PC was just simple window with some on/off buttons that called the specific http commands for my lights.
For my RPi setup, I used openHAB.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday April 20 2022, @08:03AM
EJ, Fluffeh:
Thanks for your responses!
There is so much out there, and I already have more wild gooses running around than I can catch. If it didn't get on my radar as a potentially useful technology by it's appearance on open source forums, I have a strong tendency to consider new technology things as proprietary junk, designed to hold my investment in it hostage to compel me to additional investment lest I have to consider everything I put in it to be a sunk cost. It's a throwaway from the get-go.
For me, an Alexa falls in that category. So do smart TV or a car that requires an internet connection.
After reading your posts, I know I passed over something that I may have found very useful. I would love to find off the shelf things I can control with a packet that I can craft and send to it. If the thing requires a subscription, even if free, I have little use for it. I cannot afford the time I would invest in implementation of a technology, only to have it arbitrarily yanked out from under me.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday April 20 2022, @01:31PM
Now we know why all the Raspberry Pis are constantly sold out. Okay, this is probably just one of various reasons. Still, kinda sucks that you're hard pressed to find one to buy at retail price.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday April 20 2022, @02:47PM
tasmota for the win.
I have over 10 'smart' power switches that I reflashed with tasmota and its 100% open. very good fw and has not failed in the 2 years I've been using them.
there used to be a hack where you could air-root the thing with a rasp pi and a hacked server that fools it into taking new fw ota.
not sure if that is patched or not. if patched, you then have to open the units to serial flash them, but its not hard.
anything ESP based can be controlled with tasmota, even wemos d1 mini modules, then diy it from there.
no need for a 'hub' when everything is native 2.4g wifi. and nothing goes outside your lan with tasmota.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @05:11PM
How dare people expect the product they purchased to work as advertised. The gall of some people.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 20 2022, @04:11PM
You might be amused at some google results.
I recall two projects that might interest you from the 2010's relating to Insteon and arduinos.
One dude had a library small enough to fit an arduino and you plug it into a 00s era COTS RS-232 power line modem and hook up the arduino RS-232 with a TTL to RS232 level converter and you can make the arduino act as either a device OR a controller, IIRC. I "always planned on trying this" but I never bought a serial PLM I was one of those ethernet PLM guys from the start, IIRC. OR maybe I just didn't want to drop the money on a second PLM. Remember the protocol was designed around turn of the century to replace X10 which could be implemented with mechanical reeds and 555 chips so insteon despite being lightyears beyond X10 is not complicated protocol and even a mere arduino is more than smart enough to speak the protocol.
The other project you might find amusing, which I also never got involved in, was a PLM shield. I recall seeing that and pondering how many "arduino LED blinker" people would electrocute themselves with that. But at a cost of about three PLM modems you had a shield-as-a-PLM. For that price I would wire a PLM and level shifter to a plain arduino RS232 port. But I never got around to it.
Mostly I controlled my Insteon stuff using a CPAN perl library, misterhouse which was a perl based home automation system, and right at the start of homeassistant era I was still using insteon PLM. All that stuff is/was FOSS.
I never had anything to do with the phone app nor the internet connected servers and the internet hub hardware, I was a PLM and FOSS guy all the way.
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 20 2022, @08:16AM
What's that, you say? Their dog is actually a smart Aibo and it's now refusing to recharge? Damn, foiled again.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 19 2022, @11:37PM
Out go the lights.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @12:18AM (1 child)
From:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/04/18/smarthome-firm-and-early-homekit-partner-insteon-is-dead-with-no-warning-to-customers [appleinsider.com]
"Production of the Insteon Hub ended about five years ago. Practical support from the company for the hub ended about three years ago."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday April 20 2022, @04:25PM
The problem with Insteon is it injected a VLF signal onto the power line, which requires some heavy duty capacitors, which they didn't use to save money and increase repeat sales, and this made the devices very sensitive to lightning damage.
I was experiencing a failure rate around or higher than 1% per year per device, which sounds awesome failure rate for a car, but if you buy two or three dozen devices that means some god damn thing burned out every season, which is incredibly annoying and gets expensive. X10 devices were shit but they were not value-engineered to high failure rates and would work poorly for decades, insteon not so much. I now use zwave which is radio 902 Mhz band and is as reliable as any switching power supply and I've never actually had a zwave component failure yet despite more devices and half a decade or so now? The point of my rant being that probably at least a quarter or more of the hubs ever made have already burned out and the rest of them will be gone soon enough.
Also they stopped selling devices a couple years ago. So the point is if your lamp dimmer blew up five years ago and they don't sell those anymore you had to start moving to zwave or something else WAY back then, so you never bought another insteon device ever again, so they torpedo'd their own sales channel. Why would I buy an appliance relay knowing they already discontinued dimmers and my brand new zwave infrastructure works great so bye bye insteon never buy another device again. And eventually you replace everything, either due to failure or desire to reduce complexity and get rid of the last of the insteon trash.
The other problem with insteon transmitting over power lines is you needed a phase coupler in the USA as we have sorta-2-phase and thats a gadget that plugs into your dryer outlet and burns out every five years or so sometimes with smoke although the UL listing must have been true because it never outright caught fire. The insteon people tried to pivot into running the protocol over RF but the range was shit compared to zwave so it never worked very well.
Since the earliest days of insteon there have been web pages discussing re-capping insteon shit hardware after a capacitor failure which is great if the cap pops and fails open but when they fail shorted theres usually not much left of the PCB but scorch marks and its a total loss. Unlike no-name Chinese gray market shit insteon at least fused their hardware so after a cap failure you'd get scorching but no outright fire.
So yeah all that insteon stuff is dead for years. Like an article about Oldsmobile ending parts supply, after all those cars been thru the crusher other than antiques and collectibles now.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @12:24AM
https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/1514786647396605958 [twitter.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 20 2022, @12:35AM (3 children)
The Mexicans got it right when they observed that the US is the home of smart phones, and dumb Americans.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @01:11AM (1 child)
Russians are super smart!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @02:21AM
This Russian could be one of the smart ones?
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-tycoon-tinkov-denounces-crazy-war-ukraine-2022-04-19/ [reuters.com]
Then again he may be a little too smart. He became a US Citizen 20+ years ago...and then got caught not paying his taxes when trying to renounce his US citizenship a few years ago.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @01:24AM
Those Mexican immigrants love their smart phones just as much as the rest of us.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @12:53AM
Break me off a piece of that KIT KAT BAR!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @12:56AM
You must construct additional pylons!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday April 20 2022, @01:24AM (7 children)
Yes. Yes it is.
What you mean to say is that the consequences aren't as dire with this particular cloudy collapse. But the very existence of those products and services means there are enough dumb people willing to pay for them to make it a profitable industry, and that's tragic beyond description.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 20 2022, @02:01AM (6 children)
I have one of those pet feeders. https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/pet-lodge-chow-hound-dog-feeder-50-lb-capacity?cm_vc=-10005 [tractorsupply.com] No 'lectricity, no clouds, no connectivity. You go to the store, buy a 50 pound bag of dogfood, dump it in there, and don't worry about feeding dogs (or cats, or bluejays) for a couple weeks. That feeder provides endless hours of amusement, and there are no subscription fees involved!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @03:01AM (1 child)
I really enjoy the bonding experience of feeding my animals.
However, I do have a little spring loaded nose operated water dispenser for them.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @03:31AM
As fun as the nose-operated dispenser is, I find it's easier for me to use my hands.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @03:04AM (3 children)
How do you keep the ants and roaches out of it?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 20 2022, @10:03AM
For whatever reason, vermin have never been a problem. Probably because there are a boatload of canine, feline, and avian predators always watching the feeder. Vermin have little chance, especially during daylight hours.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 20 2022, @01:55PM (1 child)
Use sufficiently large caliber ammunition.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @02:45PM
These guys [youtube.com] have you covered.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @02:01AM (2 children)
I've been intrigued by this and the other open source one (whose name escapes me at the moment), but have yet to muster the energy to make any serious effort in learning about it.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @01:08PM (1 child)
How is this Offtopic??
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @03:46PM
Plenty of dumb moderators and more than one bot working sock puppet accounts around here. Don't take it personally, it never changes.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @08:14AM (2 children)
methinks the only home automation one needs is the one that keeps the cats from starting to eat you before someone discovers you died alone ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @09:55AM
Probably sooner than the cats will.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @12:44PM
You want your cats to die too?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @02:12PM
I could spend money and time computerizing my electrical lights, but WHY? I just walk over and flip a switch if I want it on. Leaving one light on all night in one room for nightlight purposes (assuming you don't own a nightlight) is not even that big a deal since lights are now power sipping LEDs. Do you all live in mansions where you need automated light schedules for certain wings of the castle?
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Wednesday April 20 2022, @06:02PM
My lights still work. What's the problem?
There will not be any automation in my house that is not 100% controlled by me.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.