iLink INSTEON scene management software

ilink - Software to manage home automation scenes using SmartHome's INSTEON home automation products.

Note that new Insteon devices are no longer fully compatible with the Insteon PLC controller that ilink uses. Smarthome has issued the following statement: Because the PowerLinc Controller belongs to an older generation of controllers and has not been updated with the latest revisions, it is no longer compatible with INSTEON devices as of March 2012. The PowerLinc Controller can be used to control X10 devices. For INSTEON control use the new PowerLinc Modem (2413U). The PowerLinc Modem (PLM) is not API compatible with the PLC which means that iLink is not able to communicate with the PLM.

All development and support for iLink has ceased. The code and infomation on this website will remain for historical purposes.

There are currently two versions of ilink. There is a command line only version and a GUI version. Both versions offer basic scene management. The command line version is used for proof-of-concept testing and has more options for testing and experimenting with INSTEON control. Both versions should be considered Alpha quality. I've been using them in my environment without problems but these are distributed with no guarantees.

There are also a couple of other command line programs that can be built. icmd is a simple command line program that sends Insteon commands to devices. It takes a device id, command name, and command data as arguments.

timers is a command line program for listing and loading PLC timers. It supports the same text file format as InFreeHome but adds the capability to set timers that execute group broadcast in addition to direct commands.

download is a command line program to download a timercoreapp to the PLC. In addition, it can also dump regions of the PLC's memory. The most recent timer core application for the PLC is version 12.

spyder is a command link program that tries to find all your device links and save them in a file. You can also verify device links against the file and add new links. A basic command-line link management program.

ilink is currently distributed as source only and is licensed under the GPL.

ilink source Version 0.2.22a (May 9, 2008) Fixed bug that prevented sending commands to remote devices. The link and spyder command can now take the PLC /dev/xxxx as an argument. Added initial code to spyder to actually spyder an Insteon network. Worked on the hid low level driver so it should communicate with the PLC more reliably.

Here's a screen shot of the main GUI screen:
main screen
More screen shots

Requirements

Linux (currently tested on Fedora Core 5)
INSTEON PowerLinc V2 USB
GUI version: GTK+ 2.4 or later
GUI version: libglade 2.10 or later
USB driver for the INSTEON PowerLinc V2 from the Linux Home Automation site

Features of both versions

Create scenes without physical access to the devices.
Support for all 5 buttons on the ControlLinc V2.
Support for all 8 buttons on the KeypadLinc V2.
Support for KeypadLinc V2 as a scene responder and controller.
Program link tables of individual devices.
Program all devices with all scene information.
Keep a backup of all the scene information.
Ability to assign meaningful names to devices.
Ability to discover device info (id, type, etc.) by putting device into linking mode.
Ability to add/modify/delete the timers in the PLC.

Features in the GUI version only

Ability to replace one device with another in all scenes. (Can be used when a device is physically changed)
Ability to query all known devices and build a scene database.
Individual device control/status.
Ability to program a PLC link database with all known devices.
Ability to configure some aspects of KeypadLincs.
Ability to list PLC timer events (edit/add coming soon).
Ability to copy a scene from one controlle to another (soon).

Features in the command line version only

Ability to query a device to make sure it is responding to commands.
Ability to read blocks of a device's internal memory.
Ability to write individual bytes to a device's internal memory.
Monitor mode to view INSTEON traffic.

Features in development

KeypadLinc configuration.
Timer support.
Ability to make the PLC a controller of a group.
Scheduling/event based commands.
Make the program multi-threaded.

Notes

While the code distributed only works with the USB version of the PowerLinc V2 controllers, it would not be hard to replace the low level USB communication code with serial port code.

There are actually 4 versions of the low level communication code included:

ikd.c - interfaces to the iplcd kernel driver.
iusb.c - interfaces via libusb library api.
ihid.c - interfaces via hiddev api.
iser.c - interfaces via tty port to serial PLC.

ihid.c is the version I currently use. The other versions should work but may require makefile changes to get them to properly link. The libusb version seem to be less reliable and is slower, probably by a factor of 2 or 3. This slowness may simply be tuning. iser.c is untested at this time, I don't have a serial PLC.

Porting to Windows is probably possible, if this is something you'd like to do, please contact me.