HouseBot

I know I’m late to the party here. But everything HB-related has been working flawlessly. But today, i chose to replace a failed Insteon wall switch with a spare. Then i discovered that Insteon (i.e. Smarthome/Smartlabs) is apparently out of business. This begs the question of what to replace Insteon lighting control with as it relates to Housebot. Like I said, late to the party, but a brief search here didnt find anything. My son’s A/V/home automation business is using Lutron Caseta and RadioRA, which is, i assume, IP addressed instead of PLC. Of course, I could migrate lighting to Alexa devices and set up tasks within the Alexa app. But not sure how Alexa hardware (wall switches, plugs, etc.) can be controlled via HB. I know (and I use) Alexa can be used to control devices etc. “built” and controlled by HB. So, several questions: 1) How can HB control Lutron or other lighting control devices? 2) Can HB address/control Alexa hardware? Summing up, what facilities are available to replace Insteon? And I apologize if this has been discussed here before.

<crickets>

Steve,

As far as how HouseBot can control Alex devices, it can't directly. I believe Alexa does have a way to do this from HouseBot, but I remember the API for doing it was going to be a lot of effort to implement. And for me, I just have Alexa control HouseBot (ZWave and a X10).

Thanks. Me too - Alexa using HB to control stuff behind HB. At some point I guess I need to migrate toward ZWave or some other method of lighting control. (I'm surprised you or anyone else is still using X10. I had 1 or two stand-alone (non-HB) lighting control applications, but the hardware became too finicky. Pitched all the X10 stuff.)

I just have a couple of old X10 things. One is really far away and would be out of the range for the ZWave controller.

The thing about X10 is... it's cheap, and it works.

And at some point I'd like to start switching over to Matter devices, since they seem to be the future if you believe all the hype. I haven't done any research into it to figure out what my controller options are or how to even start writing a HouseBot interface for it.

I just looked into an Aqara FP2 presence sensor and came around Matter as well. Aqara works with its own bridge or Homey or any other zwave bridge. For me integration with HouseBot has become easy since HouseBot interfaces with Node-Red and MQTT. There are so many options now and most of them use MQTT. I still have to buy a Homey bridge but as I understand it, all devices that talk to Homey, can be put on MQTT and with that relay to HouseBot.
But in due time, it would be nice to have something native to HouseBot in whatever form applicable.