I had an old Logitech Harmony One Universal Remote
After having the Harmony Ultimate for a few months now, I’m actually really happy with it; it’s comfortable to hold, and has enough (customizable) physical buttons that you don’t need to use the touch screen for regular activities. And you can customize the touch screen with whatever additional functions you need based on the current activity.
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Now that we’ve changed the wiring in our switch to leave the power to our ceiling lights always-on, we need a way to actually operate them. Because you’ve invested in these relatively expensive lights
The trick in setting this up is with Insteon scenes, and it can get a bit complicated. Let’s take an example and look through our options. The first step is defining your activities and which individual lights correspond to them. As shown in the last post, in my basement with 9 lights I have a few different activities I’d like to illuminate in different ways:
A relatively new device added to the Insteon stable is the LED Bulb for Recessed Lights
They’re great additions in larger rooms with multiple lights where you would like individual lights to turn on for different reasons – something not possible with a simple switch controlling all lights on the same circuit. For example, my basement has nine recessed can fixtures in a relatively big space, and I had different lighting needs for various events and activities. These guys make that possible:
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Last year I wrote a gushing review of Amazon’s support, fully disclosing that this site is supported by any purchases you, dear reader, make after following a link from this site. In that post I alluded to why Amazon is much better than smarthome.com (I’m still pissed I ended up with 2 crap Dropcams that SmartHome wouldn’t take back!), but I want to take another moment to thank you all for supporting this site, and promote Amazon by completely bashing my new arch-nemesis Dell. Read on if you’re interested in a story about loss, confusion, betrayal, heartbreak, frustration, abandonment, joy, confusement, then finally resignation (there is no happy ending to this story).
Or just skip today’s post and stay tuned for our regularly scheduled installments of Home Automation tips, tricks and reviews that you’re actually here for!
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Back in June, Universal Devices announced a new service called ISYPortal, which looks like a stellar addition to an already great product. In a nutshell, it will allow users to access their ISY994i devices from anywhere in the world, without having to make any firewall configuration changes. For those of use with deep networking experience that have a habit of hacking custom firmware onto our routers, this service might not be necessary, but for the rest of us not inclined to set up our own VPN server, create a personal domain name for remote access, or configure SSL to properly secure the device, this is a great solution.
To be fair, Mobile Integrated Solutions (makers of MobiLinc, another stellar product that’s still my go-to app for controlling the ISY994i) has had a similar service called MobiLinc Connect for about 3 and a half years now, so UDI is playing a bit of a catch-up game. As a user who’s not really the target audience for either service, I haven’t tested out MobiLinc Connect, but their configuration documentation shows a virtual identical process to ISYPortal. Pricing for MobiLinc Connect is a reasonable $30/year (and slightly less reasonable $200 lifetime subscription – I mean really, I have no idea where we’ll be with this technology in the break-even point at 7 years). ISYPortal pricing hasn’t been announced yet, but that’s likely to be the deciding factor for most users.
Anyway, let’s dive into the ISYPortal review for now, shall we? As a beta, the process is likely to change a bit by the time the service is released, but generally you activate the plugin through the ISY admin interface, and then under “Settings” you grant permission to the ISYPortal to connect. Again, the network connection actually works the opposite way: the ISY is connecting outbound to the ISYPortal rather than the other way around, which is why you don’t need to make any firewall changes, but now we’re just splitting hairs.
At this point, instead of logging into your ISY directly with the legacy approach, you’d connect to my.isy.io and log in, where you can choose to go directly to your ISY web interface, or into the ISYPortal interface:
The ISYPortal interface provides you with a list of ISY devices that have been registered to your account (great for integrators who manage multiple devices) and some high-level options for viewing logs and connecting to the device through the ISYPortal proxy:
For developers, the interface also provides you with a URL that will expose the entire REST API, in theory allowing you to do everything through this ISYPortal proxy that you could connecting directly to the device. (At the time of this writing, however, using MobiLinc through this proxy doesn’t currently work for various technical reasons, but hopefully those types of kinks will be worked out after the ISYPortal is released).
The bottom line is that this will be a great addition for dealers and integrators who manage multiple devices, or for the majority of ISY users that don’t want to deal with the hassles of securely setting up their ISY for remote access. For me, I’m more looking forward to all the awesome new features in the upcoming release of the 5.0 firmware, that we’ll be covering here as well in an upcoming post!
When I relocated my media center for a cleaner look and one less piece of furniture in my family room, I was left with a plethora (it’s a word – look it up!) of outlets and wall plates under my TV. There was a phone jack, a cable jack, HDMI conduit, and some other blank plate with nothing behind it:
File this tip in the “obvious” category, but it took me some time to get comfortable with the fact that nothing in a home in written in stone (literally – unless you’re these guys!): if you don’t like the way something looks, more often than not you can simply fix it yourself! I wanted a cleaner look, so I decided to just get rid of the the unneeded plates by simply dry-walling over them like we’ve done in the past for any other drywall work. As you can see in the above shot, I used the approach of putting a brace (I generally use the free paint stirrers you get at Home Depot), fitting in a piece of drywall, and plastering over them. But for smaller holes like this you can simplify the job with a drywall patch kit
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It dawned on me about a year ago that now that I had the ability to run ethernet between floors, send HDMI signals long distances, install ceiling speakers, and cleanly connect everything together, the media center taking up space in the living room just didn’t have to be there; with the wall-mounted TV the actual A/V components could be anywhere!
Here’s what my system used to look like:
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