I think there is a pretty large hole in the docs around the capabilities of HA Scenes.
You can create scenes that capture the states you want certain entities to be.
Which exactly are the “certain entities” here? We know lights & media player sources work fine from the examples, and I know that switches work fine from experience; what about a lock or other devices? Scenes seem to just specify states instead of calling services… ordinarily I don’t expect direct state changes to do anything except modify data inside HA. So do Scenes have some kind of extra intelligence whereby they figure out what service to call to get an entity to a certain state?
More specifically, can I arm/disarm the manual alarm control panel with a scene? Can I lock/unlock a z-wave lock (and I’ve just been doing it wrong)?
trying to figure out the best way to structure things - i would have thought it would be to create desired scenes (including lights, remote (harmony) and locks) and have various things trigger those scenes
otherwise it seems like an unnecessary number of automations
“Please note that the scene component currently only supports
one service call per entity to achieve the state. Due to this
limitation you cannot set states belonging to different services.”
kinda found the answer, which seems a little disappointing - i guess that means you can lock a door, but you’d need to create a scene specific to locks and add that in the automation
I heard the word “scene” a lot when I started reading about home automation, so I tried to structure things in terms of scenes a lot at first. Over time, it seemed clear that scripts are really a superset of scenes, and not much more effort to write or maintain.
So I usually just go straight to scripts now, and don’t bother with scenes much anymore.