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Please fix some of these gotchas

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    Please fix some of these gotchas

    I'm new to Insteon and bought a starter kit at Costco. Getting the 2245-222 hub online was extremely difficult and frustrating, eventually requiring a call to support. IMO, this was caused by numerous bugs / poor design decisions / missing important features, though I may have just done something stupid or missed something obvious. Please let me know how this should have been solved.

    The Android tablet used for setup sometimes had problems with QR codes, so I decided to enter the hub username and password manually. The first problem is that the credentials are printed (on the device) in an ambiguous font, similar to the default font for this forum. It's not a problem for English text -- you have no problem understanding "I love Indian lentils", but look closely at the first letter of each word and you'll see that the graphics are all identical. Printed random data such as passwords should use a font where all characters are unique. Any "console" font or a typewriter font such as Courier is fine. Or, the random characters chosen should avoid the ambiguous ones.

    I recognized that the password had an ambiguous character, but figured that if I guessed wrong, I'd get an error message and trying the other choice would succeed. I did guess wrong, but after successfully authenticating with the server, the app just reported failure to connect to the hub. Two choices were given: retry and cancel. Retry just tried again with the wrong password, with no opportunity to enter new credentials. Why? The hub was returning "401 UnAuthorized" status and the app should have known to prompt again. Cancel was worse -- it logged me out, so I couldn't get to the tabbed main menu to change settings. Why? It should only cancel the failed operation (connecting to the hub), not undo everything that already succeeded.

    I tried (on the hub) network reset and factory reset, and (on the app) clearing cache, clearing app data, and finally deleting and reinstalling the app, all to no avail. I have an old iPad and gave the iOS app a try, hoping that it wouldn't have the same set of bugs. Unfortunately, no luck.

    By now, it became clear that the wrong password had been stored in the back end and the suggested fix was to delete the account and start over. How, not so clear. I could log into connect.insteon.com but found very limited capabilities, compared to the mobile apps. Why? I played with both the Android and iOS apps, but couldn't trick either into displaying the main menu. Surely there is a way to do this. For example, what does one do if his hub fails and he purchases a replacement?

    I discovered that the REST API has a delete account function and thought that the problem was solved. But when applying for an API key, I was told that it would take two to four weeks. Not days, but weeks??? On most sites, this is automatic.

    Next, I tried to change the hub's password to match the incorrect value stored in the back end. But the documentation for the embedded web server is very sparse and outdated -- the best I could find was https://blog.automategreen.com/post/...teon-hub-hood/ . The newer hub would accept some of these URLs without flagging an error, but the password was not actually updated. Is there better documentation applicable to the current version?

    Frustrated with the 'poisoned' account, I created a new one with a different email address. After another hub factory reset, an attempt to set it up on Android was met with "no hub found on your network"; not true, as it could be accessed ok from a browser on the same device. The iOS app was more informative, giving an error that the hub was already assigned to another account. If e.g. a used hub is purchased on eBay or acquired from the previous homeowner, surely there must be a way to set it up without the cooperation of the former owner.

    Running out of easy things to try, I attempted to ask the question here, but the registration (in spite of using my own clean domain serviced by a respected paid email provider) was queued for moderation. I caved in and phoned support.

    Support deleted the corrupted account and I set it up again with the correct password. The hub connected immediately and is working fine. However, I was hoping to find out how the user could recover from these situations by himself, so it could be posted here and help the community. Unfortunately, the agent either didn't know or refused to tell.

    About 40 hours after registering, I received notice that my account here had been activated, without having been asked for any further information. If no additional input was needed for approval, why wasn't it automatic?

    Thanks for taking the time to read my long rant. This criticism is meant constructively and I hope that any Insteon staff reading this will find it useful.
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