fahrvergnuugen

I know why it works that way. It doesn't mean it doesn't drive me crazy that theres not a way to set a specific brightness to a scene

Ok, got you. 1F 1 is the Master and 1E & 1D are the slaves, then there's no reason to send a scene command at all. What drives me crazy about the insteon protocol is that sending /rest/nodes/12 12 1F 1/cmd/DON/143 is not the same as physically pressing the paddle and adjusting it to 143. You get two different results, meaning there is no easy way to emulate someone pressing the button with a script.

I'm not sure I follow you... What would the REST commands look like?

I know exactly how they work. Keeping the LED in sync works fine as long as you are physically using the switch as you described. However, it's a whole different ball of wax though when you are sending commands from a an application to the ISY's REST interface (or even using the ISY's admin panel). If you tell the slave switch to dim to a certainly level, the load is not affected and the LEDs go out of sync. There is currently no possible way to adjust the brightness of a dimmable load with more than one controller and keep all the LEDs in sync to reflect the brightness of the load WITHOUT using a program external to the ISY.

Because if I have a light with a single dimmer on it I can use a slider - why shouldn't I be able to do the same with a 3 way circuit? It doesn't make any sense to not be able to have the same interface for a light that has multiple dimmers vs one that has a single dimmer. The bright and dim commands are great when you have a scene with different devices set at different brightness levels and you want to just raise or lower the brightness level by a predefined arbitrary amount. My app has the GUI to support this option too. But it makes no sense to me that I have a light switch that i can physically press and the light brightens, but if i virtually press it by sending it a command, nothing happens. It also makes no sense to me that there is no way to keep the dimmer values in sync or tell a group of dimmers to go to a specific value. They are supposed to be smart!

Hi Jeff, The idea was to set them all to to the same level. If a direct scene brightness command of 50% is sent, then all devices would be set to 50%. Another idea came up about also being able to send relative brightness commands, which would allow the 50/50/25/25 you described. See this post from the product suggestion thread I started here: http://forum.universal-devices.com/topic/15383-direct-scene-brightness/?p=131347

Hi Michel, Yes, the whole point is to send a specific brightness command and all the devices should go to that brightness no matter what their current state. The initial problem I was trying to solve was synchronizing dimmers in a very simple 3+ way virtual circuit. I want to tell my dining room light to go to XX% brightness and have all the dimmer LEDs reflect that. I think they should be ignored. What happens with such devices today when you send a scene bright or dim command? I assume nothing... All it should do is automate the process of physically setting a brightness level for each individual node in the scene. I can turn a scene on and then manually adjust individual devices to different brightness levels today and it doesn't break anything. I would expect that if I sent a scene level of 56%, all dimmable devices would go to that level. If I then sent a scene "on" or "off" command, the scene should react exactly as they would today if I walked around and manually set each device to 56%... So it shouldn't break anything at all with existing scenes because this is a new command that automates a manual process you can do today. Of course adding another paradigm is also fine (although it increases complexity), but I think it can fit inside the scene paradigm without causing any issues. Remember, the whole point is to be able to synchronize dimmers in a 3+ way circuit, and to create the circuit in the first place you need to setup a scene...

If you have a scene that you don't want to be affected, then don't ever send it a direct brightness command. This is an API level command that would be available in the script interface or via REST (they could also add a text box to the java admin GUI at the scene level so you could type a brightness value in and hit enter). Point is, there isn't really a reason to interact with this proposed feature with a physical switch, only via script. I just want a way to be able to tell a group of devices to go to X% (where X = whatever brightness I happen to feel like at the moment from 0 - 255). There is currently no possible way of doing this without writing an external program.

The new feature wouldn't impact any legacy systems or scenes in any way, at all, ever. If the ISY receives a command to set a scene brightness to 56%, it would loop through each of the devices in the scene and set each of them to 56% by sending them "/DON/143" commands. That's it. It has nothing to do with on levels, ramp rates or anything else. It wouldn't change the behavior of any of the existing scene commands in any way.

That limits you to developing a GUI based on buttons instead of sliders, with no way to fine tune the brightness of a light if it has a 3 way switch. Seems like a ridiculous limitation. The sliders in this UI work awesome until you have a 3 way switch.

You could still just issue the Bright command. Implementing support for sending a direct scene brightness command would do nothing to your existing scenes unless you started using it.

I fully understand that insteon has no such thing as a scene brightness level. If you think about it, insteon predates hubs and mobile devices - they didn't envision a scenario where someone might want to set the brightness of a 3 way switch without physically using one of the switches. I will send insteon a suggestion that they should support scene brightness natively, but that would require a firmware update to all existing devices, which seems highly unlikely. The ISY is completely capable of filling this functionally void in an elegant way (as described in my product suggestion post). Why not do it? It adds value for customers, solves a real problem, fits nicely in the feature set already provided and gives people more of a reason to buy an ISY. In the mean time, I'll try and create a work around in my GUI, which really isn't the right place to do it.

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to adjust the scene's on level, I'm trying to adjust the scene's current brightness level. It's a missing feature that I think makes sense to add.

Right, and that would mean that every time i adjust the brightness from my mobile app, the on level of the scene would be changed, so the next person who physically taps the on button on the switch will get the last brightness level someone else in the house set from their phone. I don't think that's a solution.

Yup, you're right. How annoying is that! I don't know if my OCD can handle this home automation business... Doesn't that require a write back to the switch's link database in order to update it?

Just submitted a feature request here: http://forum.universal-devices.com/topic/15383-direct-scene-brightness/

I don't want to change the on levels, i just want to set the brightness of the scene. I understand this isn't supported natively by insteon, but it should be trivial to write a loop that sends a discrete brightness level to each dimmable device in the scene. It would be nice if the ISY had this feature imo.

Understood however you cannot set the brightness level for a scene as far as I know. You can only turn it on, off, fast on, fast off, brighten or dim. I wish you could set a specific brightness, but it doesn't seem to be supported. I tried: http:// 10.0.0.0/<Scene Address>/cmd/DON/<SliderBrightness Value> The brightness value is ignored, the scene just turns on. It would be awesome if the ISY would just set all of the devices in the scene to the brightness level that was passed in....

So I ran into this problem because I'm building an iOS app to control my lights. All of my dimmer switches are rendered as sliders. I'm sending commands to the ISY's REST API like this: http://10.0.0.0/<NodeAddress>/cmd/DON/<Slider Brightness Value> Where <Node Address> is the address of one of the switches in the scene and <Slider Brightness Value> is a value from 0 to 255. And of course the switch LEDs are going out of sync. Is there another way to adjust the brightness in a multiway virtual switch that keeps all of the switches in sync?

Double tapping the slave switch in my setup sets the master to 100% instantly. That works as desired.

I removed my switches from the scene and then recorded this video to show how I re-added them and that the problem still persists. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I can't figure out what. As far as I can tell I did the same exact thing as the example in the video, however the video is not dealing with dimmer switches. Notice when I adjust the brightness of the Master dimmer switch, the Slave dimmer value does not change and vice versa.

EDIT FOR THOSE NEW TO THIS POST: I had everything setup correctly, this is just missing functionality. There currently is no way to set a scene of devices to a specific brightness level on demand. A feature request has been submitted here: http://forum.universal-devices.com/topic/15383-direct-scene-brightness/ Original Post: Sorry if this has been posted here before, but I searched and could not find an answer. I'm having the most basic problem - I have a 3 way dimmer switch setup and I'm having problems getting it to work right. The LEDs on the two dimmers keep going out of sync. 1) Is there a difference between a "group" and a "scene"? Insteon instructions say that a group is simply a set of switches that are responders and controllers of each other. 1.1) How do you create an Insteon Group with the ISY Interface? To manually achieve this, I pressed and held the set button on the first switch, then press and hold the set button on the second switch. It will beep. Then repeat in the opposite order. My understanding is that this will make both switches a controller and both switches a responder to each other. This makes it so the LEDs stay synchronized when I physically touch the switch to brighten or dim. Is there a way to do this with the ISY interface? 2) Despite these switches being manually grouped, when I use the ISY admin console to set the brightness of the switch with the load connected, the slave switch's LED does not update. When I manually set the brightness of the slave switch, the switch with the load connected does not update. Is there a way to fix this? I have begun writing an app that interfaces with the REST api, but I can't figure out how to adjust the brightness of these three way switches and keep the LEDs synchronized. 2.1) I thought might be able to fix this by using a Scene, but there doesn't appear to be a way to set a direct brightness level for a scene, is that correct? Screenshots of the setup:

I know there are tons of examples out there of using a motion sensor to control a light, but I want to know why this simple example doesn't work... The light always turns on, but often will not turn off: IF Status 'Motion-Sensor' is On THEN WAIT 5 Minutes Set Light On WAIT 10 Minutes Set Light OFF ELSE If I change the WAIT to seconds instead of minutes, it seems to work fine. My only thought is that there is something happening with concurrent runs - in other words the motion sensor is sending another Status 'Motion-Sensor' is On before the program finishes. How does the ISY treat concurrent runs of the same program? Is the original killed and a new one started? Is the new one ignored? Do they run concurrently?