Centralite; a scene with only on/off?

Configuration
1

I have a Centralite home lighting system with an RS232 port. Another HA user has generously shared his code with me and I’m trying to enhance his custome component to include the Centralite scene functionality.

I have used this in my python code:

from homeassistant.components.scene import Scene

However, I’m not sure a HA scene matches what Centralite is doing. Simply, a Centralite scene is a list of lights that it should turn on/off as a group. It does not track the state of the scene. If a scene is triggered ON, then all of the lights associated with it turn on and vice versa for off, regardless of their previous states. A scene is turned on with a single text command via the RS232 port. A scene is turned off with a separate single text command via the RS232 port.

I have a scene showing up on my HA web ui and I can “activate” the scene and the lights turn on. There is no deactivate option and googling about it, I see comments that scenes don’t have a deactivate option.

Note: When the lights are turned on/off via the scene command, I do receive a status update back from the system via RS232 about the new state of the lights. So, I do always know the state of the lights.

I think there’s likely a couple of ways to do this, but I’m new to HA and my experience so far has been limited to this Centralite project. Any suggestions?

2

Those two statements are contradictory.

3

Not really. The Centralite system does not track whether a scene is on or off. For example, Office Scene does not have a state of on or off but a command can be sent to do on/off. More specifically, a command can be sent via RS232 to signal an ON for the scene. e.g. ^C001. An off command can be sent via RS232 to signal an OFF for the scene. e.g. ^D001

Centralite does track what lights are on or off. I do know if the Office Recessed Lights are on/off. The Office Recessed Lights are part of the Office Scene.

Hopefully that makes more sense.

4

In reading more, it seems my Centralite “scene” cannot be an HA scene as they are conceptually different. A Centralite scene is more like a HA Light Group where an on/off is sent to the lights in the group. I’m wondering if I need a Centralite “scene” to be an HA “light”. I’m concerned about the HA light trying to track the state as a toggle (thus it won’t send an OFF command if it thinks it is already off).