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.

Edited March 14, 2017 by stusviews

[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.