Making a "virtual device"

[fasttimes]

I'm a big proponent of ISY scenes. I create and use scenes for everything, be it a 3 way switch, a complicated room setup or just a single light switch. It makes managing your network a lot simpler, especially if you have to replace devices.

 

When I first got my Echo and bought the portal, adding scenes to control my home was beyond easy. Once I got the basic connections up, I had my entire scene structure on the portal in less than 5 minutes. However I'm missing one nagging feature. Device level.

 

So my living room lights are in a scene called LR which controls 5 insteon devices. I can only use Alexa to turn the scene on or off. I'd like to find some hack or workaround where I could create a "virtual device" called vLR and when that is set to 50% brightness, all of the devices in LR would be set to 50% of their "on" value. So if the spotlight and stand lamp in LR are set to 90% and 80% respectively, a dim to 50% would set them to 45% and 40%.

 

Any suggestions?

 

 

This would be a nice enhancement. Add a checkbox to a scene "treat scene as device".

[stusviews]

The ISY currently does not support virtual devices. There are a few workarounds, but none do exactly what you want, which is as I understand it to set all scene devices to a specific percentage of their current level.

 

One solution is to use for voice to dim or brighten a scene. In that case, each command issued changes the current setting of each device in the scene by approximately 9%. Another solution is to use Alexa groups to set the devices to a particular level, but all device will go to that level, not a percentage of what they were.

 

A third solution, is to create a scene for each particular lighting level you want. That's not too bad if there are only two or three levels, but it's cumbersome if you want more levels.

[larryllix]

Once somebody brightens one light in a scene involving 20 devices, is the scene now on or off?

 

Varying scenes is an oxymoron.

 

Sent from a tiny keyboard. Response may be brief.

[apostolakisl]

The best way to manage this (at least it is what I do), is create an extra scene with all the same devices but at a different brightness level.  Then I name that scene the same, but add the word "dim" to the end of it.  Now if you want to control it at a whole bunch of different levels, then that doesn't work very well.

[Jimbo.Automates]

What you are asking for has been proposed a few times, and I'm pretty sure Michel has hinted that it may be looked at in the future. There are issues with it, but the advantages​ in usability outweigh them, IMO.

 

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

[fasttimes]

The admin console does have BRIGHT & DIM buttons available for scenes.

[stusviews]

The admin console does have BRIGHT & DIM buttons available for scenes.

 

So do programs for scenes. Each brighten or dim command changes the brightness by about 16%. There is no way to set a percentage for scenes.