Turn ON/OFF scene with 1 button on scene controller

April 11, 2011 at 10:16 pm

I am new with Vera. I to was frustrated when I could not get the OFF button to work as expected. I fiddled around with it until I found a work around. I have Vera 2 with UI4 with Intermatic HA07. However, this will probably work with other controllers. I only have the HA07.

I have it working with a scene for on and a scene for off using 2 ON buttons. But I lose half of the controller. I now have it working with one button. The off button is still not used. However I gained all my buttons back which was my goal. It is still maddening why buttons 10, 11, 12 are not operational on the HA07. Vera just does not recognize these buttons. But as least I have 1 scene per button back.

By toggling the state of the module you can turn on and off with one(1) ON button. The Command Tab is not used in this example. Both type of modules, dimming and non-dimming, works with these instructions. On the dimming module, you will need to scroll down to see the ToggleState command.

  1. Create Scene

  2. In the Events Tab
    Device: Choose the Scene Controller
    Type of Event: A scene is Activated
    Name of the event: Create a name
    Scene Number: Choose a scene controller button number

  3. In the Advanced Tab
    Scene is Active: when all device in the scene is properly set
    Pick a device: Choose the module you want to control
    Click Add
    on the line was added:Choose ToggleState
    Repeat step 3 for additional modules.

  4. Save scene

I hope this helps with your frustration to. If you see any corrections, please let me know.

Excellent hack!

It is still maddening why buttons 10, 11, 12 are not operational on the HA07.

Seems to be a general problem:
http://bugs.micasaverde.com/view.php?id=1394

@drdata,

Neat. What if one or more devices in the scene that has been turned on, are manually turned off and then the On button on the scene controller is pressed; does that work too?

That’s the same question I had, looks like this will be fine for one light but once multiple lights end up in different states then it could turn ugly. Correct me if I’m wrong.

I still rely on Lua codding to turn multiple lights on/off with one button since my Leviton RZCS4-1LX scene controller off function does not work.
With codding you can check the state of each light and toggle them accordingly. This can also increase the number of scene buttons on any controller when you only need one button for on/off vs. one for on and one for off.

[quote=“oTi@, post:3, topic:168111”]@drdata,

Neat. What if one or more devices in the scene that has been turned on, are manually turned off and then the On button on the scene controller is pressed; does that work too?[/quote]

That works to. It does not care what the state is, either OFF or ON. So if some modules are manually off and some manually on, then those that were OFF goes on and those that were ON goes off. Yep! It can get ugly. But cool to watch it!

[quote=“Ap15e, post:2, topic:168111”]Excellent hack!

It is still maddening why buttons 10, 11, 12 are not operational on the HA07.

Seems to be a general problem:
http://bugs.micasaverde.com/view.php?id=1394[/quote]

Yep a bug indeed and well over a year old too… Given the low cost of this controller it increases the likelyhood that LOTS of users are running into this issue you’d think someone would have at the very least looked into to some degree and would comment on how hard the bug is to fix.

With my hack-programmer beany on and without even looking at any logs the first thing that screams out to me is this…

Scenes buttons 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 work fine
Scenes buttons 10, 11, 12 fail to get properly recognized.

The fact that 9 works and 10 fails SCREAMS out to me this could be a simple HEX issue.

1-9 in DEC are still 1-9 in HEX
10, 11, 12 in DEC are A, B, C in HEX

Perhaps the scene number is actually coming over in hex and isn’t being concerted to decimal for the compare… Oh and I tried using scene A (for 10) but that didn’t work… I wasn’t expecting it to but had to try it just incase.

This is just too quirky a bug for it not to get closed quickly.

[quote=“micasaverde, post:5, topic:164869”]But, to get around the limitation of a scene only controlling lights, we invented our own workaround: method #2. Vera tells the scene controller that Vera is a light. Vera programs scene #1 to set Vera to 1% dim level. Scene #2 programs Vera to 2%, etc. Now, when Vera gets the ‘Light switch go to 2% dim level’ Vera says “Aha, scene button #2 was pushed”, and runs the scene which has the ‘scene button #2’ event attached. In this way the scene can set the thermostat, turn on an X10 light, turn off the TV with infrared, etc. So with method #2, Vera is acting as the intermediary. This is the ‘treat scenes as events’ option.

Now you see the problem with the ‘off’ buttons, right? The off button just sends a ‘go to level 0’ to whatever node it otherwise would turn on. Since scene buttons #1 through 5 all just turn “Vera the light switch” on to different dim levels, the ‘off’ for scenes #1 through 5 all do the same thing: ‘turn Vera the light switch off, to level 0’. Vera can’t know which one you pressed.

The limitation, therefore, is not from Zensys. It’s because Intermatic did a ‘hack’ to get the off concept to work, since Zensys scenes don’t have an off. And Vera did a ‘hack’ with method #2 to let scenes to do more than lights. And the 2 hacks are not fully compatible.[/quote]

This was a quote from another thread that explained the problem very well…

Link: http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,1960.msg7383.html#msg7383

So in short this has nothing to do with DEC to HEX as I first presumed but a much more involved issue.

However there is a bug in so much as if Vera is including itself to each button at a defined ‘dim level’ for some reason it stopped at 9 instead of 12.

In short and to my best guess internal and hidden to us… When you add a HA07 Vera does the following as per the info posted by MCV above.

Button #1 – set Vera to dim level 1%
Button #2 – set Vera to dim level 2%
Button #3 – set Vera to dim level 3%
Button #4 – set Vera to dim level 4%
Button #5 – set Vera to dim level 5%
Button #6 – set Vera to dim level 6%
Button #7 – set Vera to dim level 7%
Button #8 – set Vera to dim level 8%
Button #9 – set Vera to dim level 9%

SO when Vera gets sent a dim message to a specific value from a HA07 it knows what button is pressed… And yes given the issues involved this happens to be an elegant solution. However the folks a MCV dropped the ball when they forgot to add…

Button #10 – set Vera to dim level 10%
Button #11 – set Vera to dim level 11%
Button #12 – set Vera to dim level 12%

This also explains why they can’t tell WHAT off button is due to the way Intermaitc? Or zwave?? Handle turning scenes off… When the HA07 looks at what devices are included in/under button #1 it just send a level of 0 to each and thus Vera can’t just inject other dim levels in the off scenes … Since they really don’t exist but are created on the fly by looking at the devices each button controls.

In a perfect world It would be nice if Vera could create virtual zwave devices because then Vera COULD simply add a different ‘virtual-Vera’ to each button.

Something like this:

Button #1 – set virtVera1 to dim level 255%
Button #2 – set virtVera2 to dim level 255%

Button #12 – set virtVera12 to dim level 255%

If they could have pulled this off then they could very well track buttons ON and OFF for all 12 buttons.

Well now that I know what the issue is… All MCV needs to do is add the missing three dim levels 10% 11% and 12% to the missing three buttons 10 11 and 12 and at least we can get full use of all 12 buttons on our HA07s.

[quote=“JimMac, post:4, topic:168111”]That’s the same question I had, looks like this will be fine for one light but once multiple lights end up in different states then it could turn ugly. Correct me if I’m wrong.

I still rely on Lua codding to turn multiple lights on/off with one button since my Leviton RZCS4-1LX scene controller off function does not work.
With codding you can check the state of each light and toggle them accordingly. This can also increase the number of scene buttons on any controller when you only need one button for on/off vs. one for on and one for off.[/quote]

Can you post your Lua code for this? I’ve tried this previously and couldn’t quite figure it out. I tried something like “If On then Off” and “If Off then On”.