Toggle between a scene and the pre-scene state

HarvsG · November 24, 2022, 1:21pm

What this does

It allows you to toggle a scene on and off with a single input. Without this blueprint, there is no easy way to ‘undo’ a scene activation in home assistant. If you think that this should be the default behaviour in HomeAssistant then vote here

How it works

When triggered it saves the current state as a new scene scene.my_scene_store_previous_state before then activating the scene e.g scene.my_scene. When triggered again it simply activates scene.my_scene_store_previous_state. It alternates between the 2 by seeing which of scene.my_scene_store_previous_state & scene.my_scene was the last to be triggered.

Once the timeout has passed since scene.my_scene was activated it assumes a new session has started and will start by saving the state and activating scene.my_scene. Even if it was due to activate scene.my_scene_store_previous_state next.

After a restart the first activation will always be to implement scene.my_scene as the pre-scene state is lost at restart.

Of course if the state before you activate the scene is identical or similar to the scene then it will toggle between 2 identical states and you won’t notice any difference.

Requirements

At least one scene
A second automation to trigger this one.

How to uses

Click the link below to import the blueprint and create it with the desired settings.
Run it by calling the service Automation: Trigger from automations, UI buttons or the developer tools.
More advanced users can fire an event. The automation listens for a custom event

event: scene_toggle
event_data:
  entity_id: scene.my_scene

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/HarvsG/493595880d45f2ed5e82f762b12980fa

toggle-scene.yaml

blueprint:
  name: Toggle Scenes
  description: Trigger this automation from another automation using This will allow you to use a single trigger to toggle a scene on or off. A timeout variable is given, after which the trigger will activate the scene irrespective of the state of the last toggle.
  domain: automation
  input:
    scene_input:
      name: Scene to be toggled
      description: This is the scene that will be turned on and off
      selector:
        entity:

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Change log

2022-11-24 Version 1.0

Help wanted - I do not know how to do these things

Allow the user to specify triggers and conditions within the blueprint - How to have user configurable triggers and conditions in blueprints?
Create a helper within the blueprint to store the state and toggle Extend Blueprints to include Helpers, multiple Automations/Scripts and Lovelace - #21 by brianewman
Allow the user to listen for events as a trigger. There doesn’t seem to be an events input for blueprints
It may be more elegant to check if the current device states match the scene and then decide whether to toggle on or off based on that. I am not sure on how to achieve this though.

123 · November 24, 2022, 3:03pm

You may consider mentioning that this blueprint relies on the scene.create service and the resulting ‘snapshot scene’ it produces doesn’t survive a restart.

HarvsG · November 25, 2022, 11:27am

I did not know this - thanks for pointing it out. I don’t think it is a major issue as the pre-scene state doesn’t really need to persist for long. It just acts as an ‘undo’ function. But if there was a restart whilst the scene was activate then the pre-scene state and the scene state would be identical.

X1pheR · October 19, 2024, 7:48pm

Did you managed to implement user defined triggers so that you don’t need another auromation? Would be very nice if this helpful blueprint would be extended with more features.

HarvsG · October 19, 2024, 9:25pm

No, I didn’t as I don’t think user defined triggers are a feature yet - I think there is a feature request open somewhere.

But you can use the new “take control” feature of blueprints to edit it as you see fit.