Hacker News Reader

Comment by creeble | Hacker News Reader

> and every single device they've ever sold is bricked.

That’s simply untrue, Cory.

I have a couple dozen Insteon switches, all controlled locally (by a non-Insteon controller from Universal Devices, which way predates the Insteon hub) and everything works exactly the same as it has for the last dozen years.

People who bought the Insteon hub and have no local control are a bit screwed, and if / when my interface module dies, I’ll be screwed too. But all my switches will still have local control.

View on HN

This only works if your hub already completed an initial setup:

> If you are a spurned Insteon user seeking to move your hardware to some other system, whatever you do, don't factory-reset your Insteon Hub. Apparently, contacting Insteon's servers is a key step of the initial setup, so this may now fail.

Seems like you're fine until your hub dies, but you'll have to switch everything once it does.

Not true. I don't have and have never owned an Insteon hub. I have no reliance on anything from Insteon in the sky. I have an ISY-994i which controls all of my Insteon gear.

My switches don't communicate with the outside world and as long as I have a functional PLM connected to the ISY, I'll be able to control them. There are probably ways to do that without a PLM too.

I will likely move to something else soonish though, likely Lutron. But I want to be clear that for those who have Insteon and have never relied on the Insteon hub, they can keep chugging along for now.

Insteon devices have switches on them allowing you to link them without a hub.

How relevant is this for the vast majority of Insteon users? Is this possible for everybody else with less technical knowledge/interest?

> exactly the same as it has for the last dozen years.

As long as no zdays for Insteon hub show up. In that case, you.f**ked(goat.tied).

It seems that you should not factory reset Insteon switches, as a call to home server is a part of the startup.

The scrubbing of the LinkedIn accounts was a classy touch.

So by this logic there is no way to not brick devices when a company shuts down. You could OSS the code but to first order nobody will bother using the community maintained version so it still creates just as much e waste.

> So by this logic there is no way to not brick devices when a company shuts down

Uh, don't make the device phone home? Make the phone home optional? Don't put software in it in the first place? There are many ways for devices to continue working long after the manufacturer is dead and forgotten.

Something has become clear to me: Since the IoT industry refuses to regulate itself, we need environmental legislation to regulate this industry.

Done! But it still wont get any security updates then so by the parent’s comment it might as well be useless.

Why couldn't they simply allow initial setup without the phone-home, then recommend a user-initiated phone-home for updates only (or request to continue auto-updates, etc.)? If I stop receiving security updates, at least I could use the devices in an isolated network, or through a separate firewall/controller, whereas the former case is just a paperweight.

I have several Insteon switches too. They've never connected to the internet and they never will -- because they have no mechanism to do so. Insteon is a powerline carrier (PLC) protocol coupled with a local RF protocol which is neither wifi nor bluetooth. The use of an internet-connected hub with Insteon is optional.

Factory resets are a non-issue with my switches.

Simple feildbusses with a hub are definitely the way to do this. Eventually you can replace the hub with something better without having to rewire the building.

Jumping on to agree: it is absolutely untrue that the devices are bricked. The hub and app are just pretty useless right now.

In fact, with Insteon, you can even set up and link devices manually without any hub at all, using the "set" buttons on the devices. The scenes and links and triggers are all stored locally on each device, iirc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com