Insteon Cross-linking and LED status synch

[alinoro]

Hi,

I have a number of 3-way circuits controlled with insteon switches which I have cross-linked. They synch perfectly when controlled locally (i.e. if I press a switch, then the LED of other switch that is cross-linked also changes).

My issue is that if I turn on a light remotely via mControl, the LED of other switch that is cross-linked will not change such that they will be out of synch.

Any clue as to what I have done wrong? I only have the insteon switches that control a load configured in mControl; but I also tried adding the other switches with no loads, but that does not seem to change anything...

[lithiumus]

Hey I have the exact same issue. In fact, if I try to control a 3-way linked non-load switch via mControl, it will not control the load switch. Maybe the only way to get around this is to create macros that will sync all the 3way switches but that's a lot of effort.

Something must be different between how the PLM communicates to swtich vs. switch to switch. Not sure if it's an INSTEON issue or mControl.

[lithiumus]

I received a helpful answer from the Smarthome forums pointing to the difference between device only INSTEON commands vs. Group commands. I have not dug into message string structure but I'm sure I will at some point just so I'm more educated and can do some of my own debugging. Device only commands are shorter in length while Group commands are longer.

The linked switches are likely sending group commands while mControl is sending device only commands.

I did read a note from Ted Singh that mControl does listen for Group cleanup commands but he does not say that mControl actually sends Group commands.

What I implemented and tested last night was to create 2 macros for each group of 3way switches in my house. Essentially what I've done is created the manual responder link for the 3way switch in mControl.

I created 2 macros... one that activates when the Primary switch status changes to "ON' which will trigger mControl to send an "ON" command to the Secondary switch and another macro when the Primary switch status changes to "OFF" which will trigger mControl to send an "OFF" command to the secondary.

Using these pairs of macros for each 3way group, all of my 3way switches now stay in sync when using mControl.

[alinoro]

It seems like what we are trying to do is not yet supported in mControl unless we use macros, which I have not tried yet.

Here is the answer I got back from tech support:

Also note there are two types of commands: Direct commands and Group commands.
- Direct commands execute on a device
- Group commands execute on a group of devices

mControl sends direct commands not group commands and such only operates on the device that you are controlling. You may want to consider using a macro which will then operate both devices.

We plan on supporting group commands in a future version of mControl.

[lithiumus]

That's good to know. The macros do seem to work in lieu of Mcontrol officially supporting group commands.