All Alexa on/off commands work as expected except for Night mode 'On'. In night mode the Alexa virtual switch shows a "Dimmer On" command in the logs, but no action is taken and nothing is shown in the Lutron logs. This is not important to me as I don't use the functionality here.
No in-Lutron Pico programming. I am talking about Button Controller app programming only. Sorry if my previous statement may have been confusing as it is in this thread that has been mostly about the "Button Integrator" app.
Here are my steps:
I set up my keypad in Hubitat. It is listed as a "Lutron Keypad" device.
I add a Button Controller instance to control the keypad. I add other non-Lutron lights like Philips Hue color bulbs to the associated keypad buttons. This works exactly as expected - keypad button pressed, Lutron scene (including mode-based scene selection controlled by Lutron Integrator app settings) is set, non Lutron dimmers are set.
I add a blank Pico to Hubitiat. It has no in-Lutron programming.
In Hubitat programming I set the Pico button to trigger a "Lutron Keypad" device button.
That Pico button triggers the actions set in the "Button Controller" instance, so actions include the Hue lights in my example.
I don't think I would expect that. But I like it as it avoids having to use RM.
I think the Lutron comparison is a good one. In Essentials each scene is unique (no shared scenes), so you have to uniquely program each keypad/phantom button, even if you want 2 buttons to be the same. In Inclusive you can have shared scenes, so set once and then just point each button to the shared scene.
Hubitat is currently closer to Essentials. One can set levels on buttons and switches in Hubitat in many ways and places and can call those the same settings from many other ways and places. But that flexibility creates many opportunities for spaghetti-like automations that are hard to trace.
What I want is to see in Hubitat is the Inclusive definition. I think it can be a very powerful way of simplifying automations. There's a Scene Manager app that works fine for switches and dimmers (it sets the switches and creates a virtual momentary switch that will trigger the scene including Alexa). But it doesn't (currently) include the ability for button devices.
I think scenes makes Alexa automations a fair amount easier and more intuitive too. Tell Alexa to turn the scene on - "Alexa turn on Downstairs Bright". Also have a group device in Alexa - "Alexa turn off Downstairs Lights". That's better than saying "Alexa turn off Downstairs Bright" IMO.
Do you mean 'pushing a button', as you're doing with Button Controller? If so, that's an interesting point.
There are two types of scenes, those that toggle and those that just are set. Both Lutron and Control4 support both. We intend to support both as well. The toggle scenes can be activated by a switch or a button, and the non-toggle scenes can be activated by a momentary switch or a button.
This feature should be added to Groups also. Or maybe not. Not clear when it would be used. Makes good sense for a scene. If a Lutron scene were attached to such a button, the type of the scene (toggle vs non-toggle) would have to line up.
I'm not sure how valuable a button selection is for groups. It seems the button number would have to be the same for all the buttons.
I use groups almost exclusively as on/off switch (esp. for Alexa as I said above). Setting other group attributes really only works well if the lights are identical. Anything more then I'd use a scene.
I don't follow. Are you saying you want to be able to activate a different scene for each mode? From the same button? So which scene the button fires depends on the mode?
If so, that's simply a mode restriction on each scene, where each scene includes activation by the same button.
Yes, I think that's right. It seems like that's pretty close to the equivalent of how the Lutron Button integrator works. You already have some of the same per mode dimmer and color flow in the Button Controller app. It's not a strictly necessary requirement. But it would be one fewer time to go to RM.
Is there a way to determine if and what scene is set on a keypad? I'd like to be able to take an action based on a scene being active.
I could see this being based on LED status for buttons on a physical keypad or main repeater. It would have to be an array as more than one LED/scene can be active at a time.
I see there is a Custom Command getLed() for the Lutron keypad. Is this something that would work? If so, how would one use that in a rule?
The getLed() command has not actually been implemented, despite the definition for it being in that driver (which should be removed). Due to the asynchronous nature of the Lutron interface, completing this implementation would take a little effort -- basically keeping the LED state in the driver for each button.
LED events are reported for each LED, and these can be subscribed to in an app (Button Integrator does so). So it would be possible to maintain the LED state in an app. The name of these events is "buttonLed", the event value is "on" or "off", and the evt.data element called "ledNumber" is the button number.
Doing any of this would required a custom app. As an event, the setting of a button LED would not be usable in Rule Machine unless RM were extended to support that as one of its capabilities. A small custom app could be written (using info from above) that would map keypad buttons to virtual switches, and then those virtual switches could be incorporated into rules or other automations, where the switch represents the LED being turned on or off. I will look at the possibility of adding this to RM.
The rule version is more useful to me, I'd like to know if LED "is on".
My use case: I want to set lights based on mode only if the lights are on. The light levels are the Button Integrator night button and phantom day/evening button levels. I currently adequately approximate the condition by testing that all dimmer levels>threshold.
