Whats up?

I know i’ve been out for a while, but im not dead!  Ive moved all my home system over to the PLM system.  For a couple of reasons.  First the PLC SDM software is no longer supported. And many times that my program has stopped has been a cause of this.  Its still a great [...]

Getting / Setting Insteon information from the Venstar T1700 thermostat

We’ll after receiving back some of my hard earned money thru 2008. I shelved out the $159 for the Insteon T1700 thermostat. It can be found here. The device is quite small, which is fine and thinner that my orginary Honeywell one which was a real plus.  To install was also very simple. And technical [...]

New SmartHome IO Linc announced

Good news, Smarthome and recent and finally put out the I/O Linc! (Or at least set for 12/22/8) SmartHome Link In simple terms this will be able to replace my current X10 solutions for the Garage which consist of the X10 Flash and X10 Universal controllers.  For what i’ve read you can ‘query’ the device [...]

Installing a Insteon Inline Linc Relay with a ceiling Fan and lamp

Disclaimer, I’m not an electrician, and mainly just showing what I did, if you chose to do this you do this at your own risk, if you feel uncomfortable please have a professional install this! Ok, here is my scenario and hopefully this can help you as well.  I have a ceiling fan with a [...]

Another way of polling Insteon Devices via VB

Insteon’s SDM COM object is great for having a preset commands at your disposal but ive ran into issues where I dont want the program to wait for the ACK.  (In this case it will pause for the response), this can be a problem in very large environment, especially if your poll all devices at [...]

How to force outlook to check for email (pop3/imap etc) via vb code

For email coming in and out, I use MS outlook, which makes interfacing with VB very easy.  But if you have configured the outlook client not using exchange, you know that you must specify the time in minutes it will poll to check for email.  Lets say you want to force it to check for [...]

The “Configuration” database

As previously mentioned my main program depends 100% off a SQL database, below is a dump of my “Configuration” database, that holds all the system settings. Many are loaded into memory the first time, or when I run PollDevices query this way the information is updated when needed.  I know its a lot of information [...]

How I Interacting Flash with my SQL / Insteon System

One of the questions ive been asked is how to I put my flash script to grab data from the SQL database and provide updates if the device is on or off etc. Well the awnser is, I dont. Like mentioned before to have your flash talk directly to a sql database you will need [...]

Best Night Light and Emergency FlashLight

Here’s a little thing we recently got, its a night light / flashlight.  Best part Flash light lights up when the power goes out also a big plus is the device uses LED’s. Since its LED technology, the little sucker will run upto 8 hours ON, and up to 28 hours on Standby. And even [...]

No more Smarthome Auctions?

Yep, its over, sadly Smart-home has decided to close their auction site?.  They claim they weren’t giving the correct buying experience. I guess it was that they noticed they could be making more $$ for the devices via other outlets, or maybe resellers not being able to compete? Many of their auctions started at $14. [...]