Blog Archives

Turn off air conditioning when doors are open

Spring is here, which means great weather and open doors or windows. In the past, the routine has been “Open door, close screen door, turn off air conditioning”. But with an Insteon-controlled thermostat and door/window sensors, the third part of

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 26

Replacing Insteon devices in the ISY994i

Occasionally Insteon devices go bad. It’s not an often occurrence, but when it does happen there’s more to the replacement than just swapping out physical gear: you also need to update the links table of associated devices and scenes, and

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 18

Put your house to sleep at day’s end

After a long day, who can be bothered to remember to turn off lights or lock the doors? Fortunately it’s easy to automate this with Insteon and some simple programs in the ISY-994i. The concept behind this is pretty simple:

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 14

ISY-994i is not vulnerable to the HeartBleed bug

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been dealing with the SSL Heartbleed bug in my day job pretty aggressively. The bug is a serious one and likely affects you in your daily Internet browsing, as any “secure” internet connections

Posted by Matt Chiste
May 3

Add an SSL certificate to your ISY-994i for secure home automation

If you’re not using something like MobiLinc Connect to remotely access your home automation system, it’s likely that you’ve created a personal domain name, and maybe even secured the connection to your home network with free VPN software with DD-WRT.

Posted by Matt Chiste
April 7

MobiLinc adds Voice Control

MobiLinc, my current favorite iOS app for controlling Insteon systems, has recently added voice control. Until iOS allows access to Siri for easy application integration, the feature isn’t ideal since you need to start up the app and turn it

Posted by Matt Chiste
March 22

Insteon-enabled your garage doors

We’ve controlled lights, checked our mail, connected our doorbell, and wired our smoke detectors, so let’s take a look at another device to connect to our Insteon system: the Insteon garage door control and status kit. Really, this device is

Posted by Matt Chiste
March 16
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