Wrapping my head around resetting a change or scene

[edokid]

Hey everyone, was wondering what most people do in these situations as I find this gets mind numbing sometimes trying to figure out all the conditions and so on!  I'm just confused how to run programs so they do something based on a trigger, but then once that's over, it goes back the way it was.

 

Simple example, lets say opening the pantry door turns on the dining room light.  If the dining room light was already on, I can have that as a condition so the program doesn't run.  Let's say though someone has the light dimmed to 30%, and I want it that when the door opens, it goes to 100%.  How would you handle then putting it back to 30% once the door closes?  Keeping in mind that in this example the 30% is something someone manually changed it to with the switchlinc on the wall, so one day it might be 30, another 50 etc.  So basically "Pantry door opens, light goes on, pantry door closes, light resets to the way it was before the door opened."

 

I feel like that one could be done with variables and isn't maybe as difficult, but it's in the larger examples that it gets complicated I find.  Say I have 10 Insteon lights in the house, some on, some off, some set to various levels of brightness.  Then I set it that when the front door opens and away mode program is on, to turn every light on to 100% brightness.  I wouldn't want it to just stay on forever, as someone like a neighbour might have had to run over, or someone might have even come home unexpectedly and I had away mode on.  How would you make a button say on the Keypadlinc "undo" what just happened?  I wouldn't want to say this button turns off all the lights, or after 15 minutes turns them all off etc, since some lights are on timers and that would turn them right off.

 

That's just a couple examples but basically what I'm getting at is what do most people do if they have lights etc set manually one way, a program triggers to make them do something else, and then you want them to go back the way they were?  Do you actually have to write every light etc into the program, or is there a way when the program runs that you can save the current state of each light as a variable or something, and then after the program ends, have it all go back the way it was?

 

Hope that makes sense!

[LeeG]

Restoring to the previous state is difficult today.  There is no Insteon command to "go back to previous level" and until the ISY 5.0.x firmware is released device states cannot be stored in Variables. 

[edokid]

Thanks that helps and makes sense, I'll just have to make sure that whatever I do is only 1 function ideally, instead of having a door open do multiple things depending on the time and so on so no biggie.  It was more the Night or Away mode, setting the door open to turn on all lights etc.  I can see myself forgetting it's on and running out to take out the garbage and then all the lights come on and then I have to go back and set them all to what they were at.  I think it will help once I have Keypadlinc's by the doors that light up when the system is "armed" vs not type thing.

 

As a side question, since I need time to open the door walk in and so on without the away mode triggering all the lights on, do most people just set it like a normal alarm where you get so much time like 10-20 seconds to press the button to turn it off before it turns all the lights on?

[stusviews]

That depends on your particular situation and what you are controlling. For example, we have an away mode (Dine Out, actually) that turns some lights on and others off immediately, but also has several delayed functions.