It would be nice if Rule Machine provided a way to set a group of lights to (e.g.) 50%, while leaving any lights that are already on at their current values.
It would be even nicer to be able to specify min/max, i.e. brighten to 50%, leaving brighter lights untouched but increasing dimmer lights (and v.v., dim to 50%, leaving dimmer lights untouched but dimming the brighter lights)
There is a newly released app that was built along these lines of thought. You might want to put in a feature request as it sounds like a great addition to it's current functions.
Yep! The app linked to above can configure any button press to dim/brighten selected lights (bulbs or dimmers--technically, anything with the "Switch Level" capability), but only ones that are already on. That was a weakness I saw in existing apps like Button Controller that can otherwise dim/brighten with button presses. (In the future, I want to implement "dim while holding" functionality for devices that support "press" and "release" events for button and lights that support the "start level change" and "stop level change" commands.)
Right now, however, it will dim all bulbs by the same amount, so if your step amount is 10% and you dim down one step and you have two lights, one at 75% and one at 100%, your new levels will be 65% and 90%. I can look into adding an option like you want. I'm not entirely sure how you want this to work--just a maximum/minimum level? Like "don't dim below X%" and "don't dim above Y%" but otherwise keep the functionality the same? And if some "on" action set a bulb above or below those levels, don't change it when the rest brighten or dim?
It would be more useful in Rule Machine itself, otherwise I need to use Virtual Buttons to map rules to these actions...
Nonetheless, that seems like a great stopgap solution. Basically what I imagined was an additional setting for the dimmer action that controls which dimmers are affected, that has four possible actions:
Download the Hubitat app
