Selecting Groups of Scenes

[lmpolsky]

I would like to define groups of scenes for lighting control for different home functions. For example groups might be “No Guests”, “Dinner Party”, “Overnight Guests”. Additionally, I would like to be able to select the group to be run with a single click from a wife-friendly menu.

Is this possible with a VeraLite controller?

Thanks!
Doc Larry

[Z-Waver]

The closest thing to what you describe is house modes in UI7. Unfortunately, you cannot implement you own custom modes, you can only utilize the existing four modes. But, tehre are several ways to accomplish what you desire.

It can be a bit more difficult, but you can have scenes that call other scenes and this will work for all versions of the Vera UI. To do it you create a scene, let’s say “Dinner Party” and then in the scene’s LUUP tab you add commands like below to run the existing scenes that you would like.

luup.call_action("urn:micasaverde-com:serviceId:HomeAutomationGateway1", "RunScene", {SceneNum = "99"}, 0)

It becomes a little tricky if you have scenes that conflict. In those cases you’ll have to take additional steps to limit the conflict or to add conditions to the appropriate scenes to eliminate or mitigate the conflict. For example, suppose you have a scheduled scene that turns all lights Off at 11:30pm every night. You would not want that to run if you were having a dinner party. So you’d probably want your Dinner Party scene to set a variable or a virtual switch and you’ll want to add some LUUP to your Lights Out scene to stop it running while that variable is set.

Another way to accomplish this, without scenes calling scenes, is to use a virtual switch that triggers desired scenes. This method is a little simpler to understand, but it requires editing all of the scenes you want involved for your Dinner Party. Depending on how many scenes you have, this “simpler” approach could become more cumbersome to setup.

[lmpolsky]

Hi Z-Waver,

Thank you for the thorough and useful response!