FAQ: How to use scenes and scripts
Scenes or scripts offer an effective means of providing additional customization for your spaces within Home Assistant. They serve as versatile tools that allow you to define and automate specific states or sequences of actions for various devices and components within your smart home environment. By utilizing scenes or scripts, you can create tailored configurations and behaviours that align with your preferences and requirements. Whether itâs adjusting lighting, setting the ambiance, controlling devices, or orchestrating complex sequences, scenes and scripts offer a high degree of flexibility and control, empowering you to personalize your smart home experience to suit your unique needs.
Your lighting experience, your way - take control and customize it to perfection!
Scenes
Scenes can be particularly useful when you want to set a specific colour for your lights, especially because the lighting control options donât offer this feature. The controlling behaviour to adjusting your light colours can vary significantly across different manufacturers and platforms, leading to confusion. Using scenes eliminates this guesswork, as Home Assistant will handle everything for you. Additionally, scenes can help unify lighting settings, even if you have multiple lights with different formats, ensuring consistent colour representation when turning them on.
Scripts
Scripts offer a versatile approach if you want to customize which lights or switches turn ON or OFF based on your specific requirements. They can activate different lights or switches depending on the time of day or set a soothing glow light when turning OFF during night lights. The level of creativity is entirely up to you. Below is a basic automation examples to kick-start your creative inspiration.
Scenes - Scripts To Turn OFF
In Home Assistant, scenes and scripts are invaluable tools for automating tasks and streamlining operations by activating predefined configurations across various devices. Unlike individual entities like lights or switches, scenes and scripts are not inherently designed to be âturned OFFâ because they represent preset states or sequences rather than ongoing statuses.
To address this, supplementary scenes or scripts are created to restore the environment to its desired state once the automation sequence is complete. These additional commands serve as reset mechanisms, ensuring that the environment returns to its default or preferred settings, such as turning OFF lights or switches, once the automation ends. Once the desired scene or script has be created entering it into âScenes - Scripts To Turn OFFâ will facilitate this action.
Scenes & Scripts - Toggle Helper
Scenes and scripts lack a discernible state within Home Assistant, making it challenging for the automation to determine their activation status. To address this, itâs recommended to use a toggle helper alongside scenes or scripts. This enables the automation system to recognize when a scene or script has been activated, ensuring smooth operation. When entering scenes or scripts in âLights - Switches - Scenes - Scriptsâ or âNight Light,â itâs advisable to create a dedicated toggle helper for each input.
Toggle helpers also assists when crossing over from normal lights to night lights and vice versa, when using the ambient options and setting the ambient site conditions to âYesâ, or when Home Assistant restarts.
Scenes & Scripts - Crossing Over From Normal Lights To Night Lights
Having a toggle helper for scenes & scripts assists for the smooth operation when crossing over from normal lights to night lights and vice versa when a scene or script are ON. You will still need to enable âIf lights are ON, adjust the lights when crossing overâ in the night lights âLight Control Optionsâ for your scenes and scripts to transition to their new state.
We can create scripts for use in âScenes - Scripts To Turn OFFâ to apply different off settings based on whether normal lights or night lights are activated. To ensure smooth operation when crossing over between normal lights to night lights and vice versa, and if your lights, switches, scenes, or scripts are OFF, weâve included an input selection in âNight Lights - Use The Light Control Optionsâ labelled âYes - Manage OFF script when crossing over.â Enabling this option accommodates the different OFF settings you may have in your script when transitioning from normal lights to night lights and vice versa. When this happens the script gets activated applying your script settings.
I hope this explanation helps you understand how scenes and scripts are utilized in the blueprint automation process.
Enjoy
Blacky
Back to FAQ: Click Here
Back to âThe Settings & Best Practice Guidelinesâ Click Here