Family-accessible scene creation?

💡 Lighting Groups and Scenes
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Hi! I'm seeking advice about how to set up a family-friendly way to use and create preset lighting scenes.

I have a new C-8 Pro Hubitat and a new Home Assistant install. I have a bunch of Zigbee bulbs and switches and set up some basic home lighting. The lights and switches work, and I can see and control them in HE and HA. But now I'm struggling with how to organize and "do" preset light scenes in a maintainable way for my family.

I'd like something "Hue-like" where my family can use preset scenes (e.g. bright, night-lights, relax) for each room, light, zone (e.g. main floor). But also can individually set bulbs and save a room's current lighting into a preset scene for later. Ideally I'd like Hubitat to "own" all of this, but control it from a Home Assistant dashboard.

From what I've read, my best idea is: create all my rooms, lights, groups (e.g. for chandeliers). Then create a handful of placeholder scenes like "Kitchen preset 1," "Kitchen preset 2," etc. So I'd have like 8 pre-made "scene slots" per room...then for each have some rule or code for every single one to "overwrite scene with current state."

I haven't figured out the last step (how to get a button to update a scene to the current state), but I'm also not sure if this is the best way forward. It seems like an incredibly tedious and fragile setup...with 100+ Hubitat scenes and 200+ Home Assistant buttons to recall/store them and need to organize them all into dashboards in rooms etc. Yikes.

I'd have guessed Hubitat would have a "device" that can store, recall, list, etc arbitrary scenes for a group of other bulbs...but it doesn't seem so!

I've searched a ton, but it seems like the only info on scenes and presets are about manually setting them up in Hubitat. Besides being tedious for all our lights and rooms etc, that feels completely inaccessible for my spouse, kids, etc.

Any advice? How do others solve this?

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I would recommend that you take a look at Advanced Button Controller by @stephack. It is a very nice package where you configure "scenes" whose properties are retained within the app and only a scene activation device is created.

I don't use Home Assistant but I would expect that you could have an iFrame in a dashboard in which case this might be of use to you in your final solution.

So:

  1. Configure a single virtual button device with say, 20 buttons.
  2. Define in ABC what each button will do. Each button has 3 actions so you would have 20 x 3 unique scenarios.
  3. Define in Remote Builder what commands to execute on various button presses.
  4. Embed Remote Builder iFrame in Home Assistant Dashboard.
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4

Have you looked into DIY Hue (https://diyhue.org/)? With a home assistant setup, you could add DIY Hue into the setup and configure either the Hue app or a third party Hue app to be the "scene" creation mechanism. Any new created scene could then be pulled into HA (and possibly HE) for button creation; otherwise, you could just have them use the app to change the room's scene while the automation platforms are used for the basics.

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Thank you all for the suggestions! I will look into them! Any other advice is welcome, but I'll update when I've tried a few possible solutions.

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how you – and more importantly, your family – keep track of all the scenes

Well with our old Hue system, we'd just set things up in the app, and save a scene to whatever room or zone it was in if we liked it. We'd pick a name that felt right "Family Dance Vibes!" in the Living Room or "Sleepy Time Night Lights" in the All Lights zone, and it'd be available to anyone to turn on or schedule. I'm hoping to replicate something like that with Hubitat / Home Assistant ...

I'm surprised there isn't a built in solution for this, nor I can't find anything about it searching. People have things like "if my custom built weather station says it's over 70 degrees outside and our phones say we're home and the garage door opens, I want the lights to dim 20%" ... but like ... "save how my lights look" in a simple way via a dashboard isn't one of the first things most people would want to do?!

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This can be done via Scenes or Room Lighting. There is a Capture button in these to save the present settings on devices.

That is not available from as far as I am aware, and I don't really remember anyone requesting this.

You could probably create some type of rule to (in part) create a scene via dashboards, but it probably would not be straightforward.

The biggest obstacle would be how you would name it if you are thinking you want to have specific names like you state you had in a previous system. In Hubitat you also cannot add a device to Alexa automatically, you have to pick devices to add. Similarly, you have to select devices to place on a Hubitat dashboard.

So none of this would be automated or one step that someone could just push a button (virtual or otherwise) and make happen.

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