Insteon unreliability with simultaneous switch presses

I have my house wired up with Insteon. In several places I have two switches next to each other that are also linked to other switches. If you press both switches at the same time then the signals are not delivered reliably to the other end =97 only one gets through. I can confirm this on my Mac (running Indigo) =97 only one of the devices is left with the correct status. If I send an explicit status request the display changes to the actual state of the device. My reading of the spec is that this "cannot happen", but like so many things that can't happen, it does, repeatedly.

More info: in all cases these are ICON relays; I haven't tried buying the full-price switch to see if somehow the retransmission is actually only supported on the high end. The switches are all firmware rev 28 with the exception of one that is rev 27.

Questions: (1) Will switching to the high-end switches fix this problem? (2) Is there some sniffer software I can run on either a Mac or a FreeBSD machine (I can dig out a Windows laptop and a Linux machine too) that will show the low-level traffic on the wire so I can verify that the retransmissions are not being sent? I'm using a PowerLinc

2413U. (3) Is there any other magic I can perform to fix this problem?

Thanks, eric

Reply to
Eric
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\I'm not sure what spec you are reading but IIRC the signal will only be repeated 5 times. Unless you are quickly tapping/releasing the switches, your finger is probably depressing them for more than 5 transmissions - the signals are sent very quickly, taking only 2 powerline cycles (just over 30 mS) per code.

I doubt that the high-end switches will change anything.

I'm unaware of any sniffer apps although I haven't tried to keep up with Insteon developments recently. It would have to rely on a PLM for input so I'm not sure what you would gain. It's a fairly simple task to view the raw signals on an oscilloscope - a storage scope might record a lengthy sequence

- but I doubt you could decode them visually. You can see some 'scope screenshots at...

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I think you're asking a lot but you might get more recent information by posting to Smarthome's Insteon forum.

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Reply to
Dave Houston

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