Mini Remote Control Keypad, 8-Scene

Limited functionality

Work as expected with direct Insteon device coupling but not recommended for complex network with central control. This device is stateful as a controller and do NOT support responder functionality… so as it does not recognize device state changes from the master controller and requires additional master controller routines to be useful

Didn't need to replace it

This is my 4th mini remote. 2 appeared to fail. Would not take a charge. Got the most recent one and it would not charge either. Found the charger was intermittent. Sometimes working and sometimes dead. Used a different charger and now have them all working so have a spare. Very handy. Have one on the nightstand to turn the lights out after getting into bed.

A portable control center

This eight button and also the one-button wireless controllers are useful for a variety of uses in combination with other control software compatible with INSTEON hardware devices. The controller software we use can also transparently send and receive commands to/from Z-Wave & ancient but still usable X-10 devices. We keep a single function wireless controller in the car to open & close the main entrance gate to our farm. There is this eight function controller used in our vegetable garden to control various sprinklers in conjunction with some INSTEON outdoor modules connected to electric valves. Instead of rewiring our old farmhouse, we are able to control lights which before only had fixture pull chain switches. This allowed us to put the wireless switches in much more convenient spots. In addition it allows closet lights being inadvertently left on, to be turned off instead of being left on sometimes for days at a time. There are competitive devices and protocols that there which cost less, but we have found that INSTEON units are orders of magnitude more reliable and have a much further action radius. There is a price for this extraordinary reliability and that is sometimes commands take several seconds before they can finally make their way through noise and other interference. They most often do what they were sent to do. In the event the controller does not get an acknowledgment of the requested action having been performed, it sets a flag which can then be used by us to manually intervene in an appropriate way. In most cases that happens when the controlled device loses power for some reason.