WTH: Light scenes needed that allow in the UI to turn on some lamps AND turn off all the others generically

Month of "What the heck?!"
,
1

I’m doing a lot of light scenes in our house that has about 100 light sources.

One really simple use case is repeating itself over and over again and is not easy to do in a generic way at the moment.

Here is this simple use case.

  • Turn on lights A and B and…

AND

  • Turn off all the other lights in the house or in an area or even better in a light group (if active) BUT excluding the ones that you want to activate

Now you have multiple messy options.

  1. List all the lights that should be turned off one by one - doable in the UI but messy and not generic
  2. Create another light group for this special use case and turn it off - doable in the UI but again not generic
  3. Have some script that does the generic turn off part - can be generic but you have to do it on your own and not simply in the UI which is messy for such a simple and always repeating use case

With “not generic” I mean that you possibly have to edit this scene later on when new light sources get added to the house or that you have to create a new light group for every single use case. Not really smart.

So to sum up it would be awesome to be able to have a simple way in a light scene UI that allows to say

“turn of all lights in a light group except A and B and …”.

Everytime I’m creating a new light scene that follows this pattern I’m having this WTH moment since it must be doable in the UI in a simple and easy way.

2

It’s not exactly what you are asking for, but labels will probably help

3

Not a bad idea. Right now, you can add a light group to a scene, set its state, and then add a light that is part of that light group, and set its state differently. But when you apply the scene, the individual light state is overriden by the group. At least it was in the short test I did.
I guess it would be relatively straightforward to check all entities in a scene to see if they are part of a group that is also in the scene. And then make the order of the commands such that the commands for the individual entities are sent last (not sure if that works in all protocols though).

4

Duplicate: WTH isn't there a "except..." for turn off/on ?

EDIT: My bad. I misunderstood the WTH

8

Not really a duplicate. That is WTHing about the light action, this is about scene configuration from the UI.

9

I have tried to clarify what I mean in the main post a bit better. In the end it must be easily doable to turn off a specific set of lights excluding a short list that is editable in the UI. Editable means you just choose the entity in the UI.

I have about 20 scenes that always turn on some lights and need to turn off all the other lights. Now I have light groups for sure. But they always include the ones I want to turn on. So they must be excluded.

So in the end the easiest way would be to turn off a light group excluding some light entities that you can easily pick in the UI.

10

Yeah that would be one way of doing it. Since I have no clue about the inner workings of HA it is down to the people that have more overview over the framework.