Improve Scenes!

Feature Requests
1

I feel like Scenes are being overlooked in every new update and it’s the one feature all smart homes share.

  1. Scene State
    A scene should have a sensor so you can see if it’s active or not.

  2. Run in parallel
    Things in a scene should run in parallel so turning one on doesn’t feel like a disco. They should all go together. (NOTE: this might be the case already but its just missing my next point #3)

  3. Set transition times for lights
    Just like in scripts, we should be able to set lights transition time. This goes hand in hand with #2 so that when you are changing a scene it feels smooth.

  4. Don’t auto activate a scene when editing
    I’ve seen this called out a few times with lots of upvotes, but wanna call this out again.

I would love to see a scene update soon. I feel like we’ve seen so many features with Automations and Scripts being added but scenes have always been left on the back burner, even though it’s the one thing every smart home service have.

2

The issue here is defining what is a scene. Often it not just the turned on devices, but also the turned off ones.
And what about devices that do not report back states?

It is often not possible to do that, because many devices are using a shared communication channel, such as wireless technology, like Wifi, Zigbee, Z-wave, Matter or RF among others.

3

A scene is not something that is active or not active, it’s a one time action to set the devices configured within the scene to the preferred settings. You can also not deactivate a scene, only create an other scene that sets the devices configured within the scene to other preferred settings. That’s also why the state of a scene is a timestamp, and not a boolean on/off state.

5

If you have devices in your scene that do not report back then it wont show as active. But if you have a scene where are your devices does show it should show as active.

6

So you are saying that other smarthome services, Apple Home, Control4 are doing it wrong? They all have scenes that shows if they are active. Isn’t that the point with a scene? Else you might as well just use script.

7

I’m not saying anything about Apple Home or Control4, I don’t use those systems and don’t know how it’s implemented in those systems. I’m only explaining how it works and is designed in HA. And yes, the functionality of a scene could be reproduced in a script, however editing a scene is much more user friendly for the novice user

8

About nr 3, transition times for lights. Though it can not be set in the scene itself, when calling the scene you can define the transition time:

action: scene.turn_on
target:
  entity_id: scene.livingroom_cozy
data:
  transition: 5

Of course the devices in the scene need to support transition, not all devices do that.

9

If the device does not report its state, then the scene sensor will never be able to be set to true.

10

Yes, they are doing it wrong.
They are closed systems, which is wrong.
HA is an open system, which is right, but that also sets limitations, because HA can not dictate the technology and protocols used.

11

Didn’t know about this, thank you!

12

Well with a custom switch and 8 lines of template code this is achievable for me, to see if all lights and switches in a scene meets all criterias and have not been changed in the last 10 seconds. So it’s possible, and would be so much more intuitive and user friendly if added.

My whole point here is, why is there even Scenes if they serve really no functionality, since you can accomplish this using a script. Everytime I or someone else here brings up the lack of scene features and the not so user friendly experience of it it’s met with resistance. Home Assistant beats all smart homes out there when it comes to everythign except scenes, so let’s improve on whats really lacking to make it even better?

1 Like
13

Except you can dynamically save states as a scene in order to restore it later.

Seems ambiguous. What if a device is part of more than one scene. If you apply scene x, what is the state of scene y if both e.g. contain or affect the same light?

14

Have to agree with the OP here. I don’t use scenes in HA for this reason. I do use them in HomeKit, which is an integral part of my setup (for several reasons). e.g. I have a scene that closes the garage door, locks all the doors, sets the alarm, etc. If all of these things are “true” the scene is considered “on”, irrespective of if I did them individually or “set” the scene. As such, it is both an “action”, as well as a status.

I do use Groups in many cases in HA which, for the most part, work as a pseudo scene. e.g. I have a group of All Locks that I can “Set” with a service call and can easily see if all are locks are locked or not.

15

There’s a lot of overlap here with an existing feature request, which is currently the 6th most voted request: Improve Scene editor, allow scene edits without setting devices' states

And if you exclude already-implemented feature requests, it’s the 4th most voted request.