I’ve never understood how you folks handle groups of lights in HA, so maybe one of you can set me straight. My lights are mostly Insteon dimmers, and I use the ISY994 to program them. Before Alexa, Google, Smartthings, HomeAssistant came to be, my Smarthome was completely off the grid.
Using the ISY, I programmed my dimmer switches to interact with each other. When I pressed “on” on a dimmer switch (located on the 1st floor) for my 1st/2nd floor stair lights, it would also control the “slave” switch (located on the 2nd floor). And when I used this slave switch, it would change the “master” switch and turn on the lights. This basically duplicated the traditional 3-way circuit the electrician installed.
So I used the ISY to setup my entire house this way. Then I decided I wanted the stair switches to be a bit more advanced. I wanted the 1st/2nd floor light switch to control the 3rd/4th light switch. And their dimmers. And vice versa. Fortunately the ISY can handle such situations and easily send the commands to every switch to link them together.
Once this was done, I could basically unplug the ISY, because I just used it for programming. But because the ISY has a REST interface, I discovered it was easy to send commands to control my devices. And I quickly discovered the easiest way of controlling things was to create an ISY-scene. For example, I created 3 stair scenes. STAIRS UPPER, STAIRS LOWER, STAIRS ALL. As the names imply, each group contained the matching Insteon dimmer switches. They also contained the brightness level and ramp rate for each device. So I created a web application where I had a “Stairs” button and it was linked to the STAIRS ALL ISY-scene. When I pressed it, the scene turns on all of the devices to their specified (by the ISY scene) “on” brightness level and using the specified ramp rate. A press to the button then turns the scene off, using the same ramp rates.
I remember when I installed Alexa. I discovered the ISY had a portal that would link to it, so I gave it a try. Alexa discovered my “All stairs” scene automatically. Alexa, turn on all stairs. And it just worked. I had voice control added to my system in just 2 minutes of configuration.
But most of this requires me going through the ISY, which seems like an unnecessary step. I decided recently I want a new voice command called “quiet stairs”. I want this to control every stair dimmer in my house. When I say, “Hey Google, turn on quiet stairs” I want the stair dimmer switches to power on to a specific power level, using a specific ramp rate. I also want to “Hey Google, turn off quiet stairs” to turn those items off at the ramp rate speed. Home Assistant scenes don’t seem to have an “off” function, so I don’t see any way of getting this functionality strictly via Home Assistant. What am I missing? I can’t be alone in wanting scenes to operate like this.