Triggering Keypad Button LED level changes

[redridge]

     

We have one triple gang set of Keypadlincs that is right off the head of the master bed.  If my wife is laying that direction it is like a glowing beacon no matter what the settings are, so I have scheduled the off level to zero from 11pm to 6am.  Trouble is that isn't really working for us as after 11pm we really can't find it without feeling around in the dark.  Back when I remodeled that area of our condo I installed 8 of these little Visonic SPY RTE's all over the place, flush in the walls in hallways, in the top of thresholds, heck I even have two of them in the top of my pocket door mechanisms.  The RTE's are simple egress versions with no sensing delays and have a relay-less 3 wire transistor activation.  They will probably last forever.  The idea was to use the logic of the TCM+/Stargate unit to serve as occupancy and/or direction sensors.  Well the X-10 systems was way too slow so the sensors have sat there for years.  Now I see that the Elk/Insteon integration truly does give very quick trip data to the ISY.

     I was hoping that the SPY I placed to catch us as we are leaving the nook where the master bed sits that it could bring up the illumination of the Keypadlincs but in testing the programming it seems to take about 20 seconds upon triggering the program.   Has anyone figured out a shortcut to make the keypads change button LED levels quickly?  I realize I can just have a light trip but we don't want to wake each other up unnecessarily. 

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I have one more thought.  Could I assign all or some of the buttons of the blacked out keypad as responders to a phantom scene (a sort of alias) for about a 1/2 minute or so while the ISY is processing the instructions for the new midnight egress brightness settings ?  It would not affect those button's designated controller functions regardless of their brief state of illumination, and I could set the on levels very low so as to easily distinguish between what will briefly be the new on/off levels.  Just a thought.   Or I could have just the one or two buttons illuminate that would be the most likely used in that midnight run to the bathroom or kitchen?  

[lilyoyo1]

Ha e you tried this with an actual insteon motion sensor? I would think it would work better since it's not embedded and can be placed in ways which would allow it to trip when you entered a defined area and account for timing. Since the device would communicate directly with the isy (without a middle man) the program should trigger much faster as well. 

[LFMc]

5 hours ago, redridge said:

I have one more thought.  Could I assign all or some of the buttons of the blacked out keypad as responders to a phantom scene (a sort of alias) for about a 1/2 minute or so while the ISY is processing the instructions for the new midnight egress brightness settings ?  It would not affect those button's designated controller functions regardless of their brief state of illumination, and I could set the on levels very low so as to easily distinguish between what will briefly be the new on/off levels.  Just a thought.   Or I could have just the one or two buttons illuminate that would be the most likely used in that midnight run to the bathroom or kitchen?  

Low tech solution?  Glow in the dark sticker or decora wall plate. No programming needed. (-;

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5 hours ago, lilyoyo1 said:

Ha e you tried this with an actual insteon motion sensor? I would think it would work better since it's not embedded and can be placed in ways which would allow it to trip when you entered a defined area and account for timing. Since the device would communicate directly with the isy (without a middle man) the program should trigger much faster as well. 

I have been fooling around with an Insteon motion detector to trigger the program.  It's too bad that the keypad LED level changes can't be triggered more quickly, THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN COOL!

[lilyoyo1]

1 hour ago, redridge said:

I have been fooling around with an Insteon motion detector to trigger the program.  It's too bad that the keypad LED level changes can't be triggered more quickly, THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN COOL!

There's no way around a delay since it has to be triggered by a program. The best you can hope for is placement that allows for triggering of the lights before you get to the switch location. 

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I've discovered that a motion trigger program to adjust keypad backlight levels will do nothing after those command lines, even if you insert delays to allow time for the code to go through. So I had to trigger another program with a delay at the start of it to eventually re-adjust those backlight levels back to the black-out mode, and that works.  I think your right though it's probably better to light two possible low level night-light paths upon motion triggered from someone getting out of bed and have that 3 gang keypad come up to viewable/controllable backlight levels in the interim, and then eventually go back to dark-out mode in these middle-of-the-night scenarios.

 

One last solution would be to have a micro-linc relay in that box with those three keypads, have them adjust down to the midnight level before completely shutting them off (powering them down)  The motion detector could then trigger the keypadlincs to get power again, and maybe their reboot time would be much less the the ISY command rewrite time.