Insteon Smart Homes Lobotomized As The Company Seemingly Cancels Itself

All Traces Are Being Erased, So There’s No One To Stop You From Modding

The executives of Insteon have erased all trace of the company from their LinkedIn profiles, and in the case of the CEO Rob Lilleness may have gone so far as to remove himself from LinkedIn completely.  This is after three days of server downtime, regardless of the website claiming all services are up, the deletion of their forums and a disappearance of all social media accounts.  This suggests the company and it’s smart home products are done for, regardless of the lack of any announcement.  It also means the end of their somewhat questionable tag line.

If you did pick up some of their smart home products, you could consider tossing them and switching to Z-Wave or ZigBee but there is another alternative.  Insteon’s products use their own dual-mesh protocol, via radio waves and powerline ethernet, and it was reverse engineered some time ago.  That lead to the discovery that almost everything is controlled by the Insteon Hub device shipped with the smart thermometers and such, and can be mostly weaned off of it’s dependency from Insteon’s cloud infrastructure.

The company has disappeared without warning, which means there is no one left to try to sue you for modifying your own property.  A factory reset might not be wise, though even that may not be insurmountable according to some of the links included in The Register’s story.  Take a peek for more information on modding Insteon devices as well as details on the foreshadowing of this disappearance.