Universal Devices 994i > Universal Devices EISY vs Insteon Hub 2?
I currently have an Insteon network with 50 devices on it. It is currently controlled with a Universal Devices 994i controller. It works very well. I can have the outside lights turn on at 6 AM and turn off 15 minutes after sunrise, with a similar program for at sunset. I can click to enable and disable programs to turn on and off some lights in the evening when we're away. I can use it to create scenes and control them in different ways, changing the number of retries, the ramp on-rate and off-rate, the % of full intensity, and the like. However, the 994i has been discontinued and when I had to replace a dead Insteon KeypadLinc with a new one I just bought, it can't program it. And UD won't likely be updating the firmware/software to fix this. So, I could get a UD EISY with updated software likely including the new Insteon I3 (?nee Nokia) line. Or, I could get a new Insteon Hub 2 instead. The UD EISY will probably do things that I don't want/need to do, but the idea of paying for mobile access to the Insteon Hub 2 goes against the grain. I have to admit that Universal Devices' software and website usability sucks royally (I say this as a UX dweeb who has lectured on UX, albeit for medical software, internationally). So, since the Insteon forum, despite financially-shaky, works a lot better than UD's forum, I'm posting this here in case someone else has thought about this and done even more research than I have. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
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Having gotten more information from a usually-unreliable source (the Internet), it seems likely that Insteon has decided that the Insteon Hub 2 can only be controlled from a smartphone app. With my ISY I have found that my big monitor and mouse on my Windows 11 workstation are very important to managing this big network. Especially so, given that a significant number of my devices are 6-button wall switches – essentially 5 devices in one – the idea of trying to manage such a big network on a tiny screen with my phone and a finger and a virtual keyboard seems like a non-starter. Despite my dislike of the Universal Devices user interaction design, I would hope it is better with the EISY, and I know I can control it from my Windows 11 workstation (or for that matter, plugging a monitor and mouse and keyboard directly into the EISY).
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