Will the "scene off" buttons on my remote work as expected?

Community Playground General Discussions
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I’m a new user, having just purchased a Vera2, a GE45601 remote, and a few lights and switches. The remote nicely gives me a bunch of scene switches, each with an “on” and an “off” button. Having paired things up, I set up some scenes and quickly found that the “scene on” buttons worked fine, but not the “off” buttons. So, I poked around some on this forum, finding several relevant threads, especially http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=1960.msg7383. I understand that this isn’t entirely straighforward, because MCV needs to work around the fact that there really is no “scene off” in the z-wave spec.

It seems that there used to be two methods of using the scene controllers, but now there is only one, as noted in the release notes for 1.079 (http://wiki.micasaverde.com/index.php/Release_Notes). I think the way this now works is that all of the “on” buttons will generate the appropriate “scene on”, but all of the “off” actually generate the same event, a “scene on” for scene #0. This is how my remote is acting.

What I would expect is that the scene “on” and “off” buttons would generate the “activate” and “de-activate” events for the scene that I attach them to.

The forum thread I mentioned above references a MCV bug report on this, http://bugs.micasaverde.com/view.php?id=631. It shows as being resolved / closed, with all the dates in 1969. There’s another bug report, http://bugs.micasaverde.com/view.php?id=422 that seems to be open, showing as “assigned”, but at low priority.

So, a few question:

[ul][li]Am I simply doing something wrong, or misunderstanding something?[/li]
[li]What is the “de-activate” event? How / when is it ever triggered? Based on what I read, and what I see happening, I don’t see what can trigger it.[/li]
[li]Is there any remote that gets this right, or even can get it right?[/li]
[li]Others seem to have gotten the scene-off buttons to work, by re-adding the remote and other weird games. How can those work? Does anybody have the scene-off buttons working properly, generating the appropriate scene de-activate event?[/li]
[li]The referenced thread is from September 2009. It’s now 1.5 years later. Is micasaverde working on a better solution? I can think of several workarounds that would do the trick, some of which are suggested in the referenced thread.[/li][/ul]

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see also http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=4658.msg25429#msg25429

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I am using Leviton Scene controllers but we had similar problems. With Leviton scene controllers their handheld unit programs them perfect…scene comes on first push scene goes off second push. LEDs light when scene is triggered and LEDs go off if any levels change on the scene. Bottom toggle can even take the scene up and down in intensity. Leviton Scene controllers did not work with GE dimmers.
The lesson I Learned is that ZWave is not as universal as we would like.
Hope this helps.
Regards
Tim Alls

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jfiddler,

Your experience is spot on correct. Yes, all the “Off” scene buttons trigger scene “0”.
Personally, I would like to see the Off buttons be allowed to be programmed as additional scene buttons, period. That way you can set them up however you want.

I would guess that most users have assigned their specific Off scenes to the On buttons, but you reduce the number of scenes by 50% using them that way and it seems kinda crazy to waste the use of all the Off buttons on scene “0”.

JOD.

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[quote=“jfiddler, post:1, topic:167731”]…
So, a few question:
…[/quote]
The ‘scene off’ thing is an invention, not part of the spec (and perhaps makes sense in the limited scope of lights and appliances). So there is no way for Vera to know which Off button you pressed.

What works though, is the case where the Off button does exactly what it used to do without Vera.

So you can setup say Scene1 to set Light1 to 75% and Tstat1 to 68F.

If you then hit the On button for Scene1 on your remote, Light1 will go to 75% and Tstat1 to 68F.
If you then hit the Off button for Scene1 on your remote, Light1 will go off.

So Tstat1 is not touched (because what would you expect it to do / what does ‘scene off’ mean for a Tstat? Which is the reason it is an invention.).

In other words, all lights and appliances associated with the scene will go off, but everything else remains untouched.

Under the hood, what happens is that Vera controls every device you have associated with the scene when you hit the On button. But when you hit the Off button, it is actually the remote that turns off the lights and appliances. (Because as said, Vera can’t know what Off button was pressed. And your remote does not know anything about devices other than lights and appliances.)

For this to work, you create the scene in Vera for when the On button is pressed (‘a scene is activated’). You than re-add your remote to Vera (by including it again). Vera will recognize it as an existing device and transfer the scene to your remote, so that when you press the Off button, the remote will turn off the devices directly.

If you’re looking to tie the Off buttons on your remote to any scene in Vera (basically having a bunch of extra buttons) like JOD mentioned, then that is not possible.

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Thanks for the reference, pgrover. It confirms what I already knew.

JOD, I agree with you completely. I understand that “scene off” is ambiguous, since for many devices there is no such thing as “off” (e.g. thermostats) and for others the desired “off” state might really be 10%. So, I did what most people do and made an “on” and an “off” scene for each desired event. One never turns a scene off, rather one can activate the “off” scene. MCV handles this fine, internally, allowing me to create the two scenes and trigger each on a different event.

The problem is the way that MCV handles the remote. It shows an “activate” and a “de-activate” event for the remote. But, there seems to be no way to generate the de-activate. It seems reasonable that the remotes “scene-off” button should generate a “de-activate” event. That event could then be used for anything one likes, as you suggest. I’d use it to trigger my “off” scene, but there’s no reason to require that - it could be just another button and event. It just seems such a waste to not be able to use the off buttons that every remote has.

Anyway, I know the way it is done now is far from optimal.

And, again, I ask the question. What is the de-activate event anyway? How can a remote generate it? If it can’t be generated, why is it there as an option?

PS. As I wrote this, there was a new post from oTi@. I’ve tried the suggestion of re-adding the remote, and it doesn’t act in the way you describe. All 'scene off" buttons just activate scene 0. They don’t turn the lights off. Maybe I’ll try again, just to be certain of this.

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[quote=“jfiddler, post:6, topic:167731”]Anyway, I know the way it is done now is far from optimal.

And, again, I ask the question. What is the de-activate event anyway? How can a remote generate it? If it can’t be generated, why is it there as an option?

PS. As I wrote this, there was a new post from oTi@. I’ve tried the suggestion of re-adding the remote, and it doesn’t act in the way you describe. All 'scene off" buttons just activate scene 0. They don’t turn the lights off. Maybe I’ll try again, just to be certain of this.[/quote]
I think MCV did everything possible (they merged the previous 2 methods into 1) to make the quirky notion of ‘on’ and ‘off’ scenes (really, a scene is ‘run’ and ‘stateless’) work as well as possible. This is as good as it gets. The on/off notion is the problem, not Vera/MCV.

So, for what I described, and I think you are looking for, is to only create a scene that reacts to you pressing an On button for a scene. You don’t create the Off part of it, because it is implied (by what Off normally does on a stand-alone remote) and therefore automatic. Namely: turn off all lights and appliances associated with that scene. When you re-add the remote to Vera, the proper scene information gets programmed into your remote and it should work.

In other words: don’t do anything in Vera with ‘a scene is de-activated’, and see if it works.

The example I gave, is a working example with the same remote.

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This behaviour is actually a design deficiency in the ZWave specifications. It is not Vera’s fault, as Vera is simply trying to do the best it can of a bad situation.

Vera needs to differentiate what button was pressed. So Vera convinces the controller that Vera is a dimmable light. Then Vera tells the controller to set the Vera light to 10% for button 1, 20% for button 2, and so forth. So now Vera can recognize which on button was pressed by the dimmable light value received. But when an off button is set, the controller sends the command to turn off the light. Unfortunately, it will be the same value (zero) no matter what button was pressed.

As stated by oTi@, this only effects stuff that Vera itself has to do. If the controller can be programmed to directly control a device in the scene (such as lights), then the controller will also turn off that device. If Vera needs to control the device (such as the thermostat), then you will see this problem.

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So when it is said that the OFF toggle on a scene controller activates “Scene 0” it is referring to what Vera activates when it detects an OFF toggle, correct?

The handheld scene controller, if used as a standalone or secondary to directly control a device, uses the OFF toggle differently, doesn’t it? I assume it just does the opposite of what was activated by the ON toggle, or returns the devices to their previous state…correct? So, instead of letting Vera push scene information to the controller, is it better to replicate the network to these controllers, then create separate scenes on the controller itself so it allows the OFF toggle to work (for supported devices)?

If Vera was in charge of scenes, couldn’t Vera store the last scene activated by the controller and activate a scene OFF or deactiavte that scene when an OFF toggle is detected. Then to turn a particular scene off, you’d just activate it again so Vera stores it as the last one activated (if you had multiple scenes actuivated), then hit the scene’s OFF button and Vera deactivates the last activated scene. Two button presses to turn OFF, but wouldn’t this work?

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  1. Correct.

  2. You are also correct, but it does depend on the controller. The Intermatic/Wayne Dalton controllers work this way. The Leviton scene controllers will work this way for leviton devices, but does not know how to turn off non-leviton devices (although MCV is working on this). Vera can properly program the contollers to some degree. However, it does appear (sometimes) that you can have better results if you program the scene using the controller itself. As far as network information goes, you always need to obtain the network from the primary controller, be it Vera or something else. You update the secondary controller(s) from the primary controller when new devices are added to the network (but this also usually erases any scenes that were created locally on the secondary controller).

  3. I simulate this using LUA code. I create a global variable that holds a value indicating the last scene that was activated. Then in Scene 0, I check that global variable and turn off what needs to be turned off. It works, but not great. There is a couple second delay while Vera processes the controller’s scene 0 and sends the commands. And if Vera resets, the global variable is lost. And the WAF is not there: “You mean I have to turn on something before I can turn it off? Get real…”

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It already works this way with scenes on Vera, so you get the added benefit of doing things with unsupported devices when turning the scene on.

I think that is doable, but first turning the scene on again may be undesirable (if you had changed the setting of a device that is part of the scene, after you turned the scene on. A light coming back ‘on’ briefly is maybe not a big deal, but an appliance or a thermostat?).

Also, response time would be affected.

Again, giving a state (on/off) to scenes is tricky. You don’t turn a scene on or off. You run a scene; once it’s done, it’s done.

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Thanks for the clarification @aa6vh and @oTi@. I’ve almost given up on achieving a high WAF, it seems like once they’ve tasted a working system and its ease of use, it raises their expectations higher. This makes total approval impossible and so I strive instead for just enough functionality and approval so there is no yelling ;). I try to remind her what a pain IR was and that the thermostat control makes it all worth it, she reluctantly agrees.

I guess the confusing part is that the scene controllers allow you to essentially turn off a scene. Some also give you an ALL OFF for lighting. I know this causes a problem for window shade control (at least on the Minimote), because you have to set a scene for open and a scene for close and there is no intuitive way of achieving a stop mid-window (you can press and hold a scene button to stop).

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I have found a work around for the frustrating problem of not using the off button on scene controllers. You can find it here.

http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=6248.msg37796#msg37796. I have created a new topic for it.

Hope this helps.

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@drdata

Very good workaround!