I’m not sure I fully understand. Are you saying the activate scene card having an area target may be misconstrued for activating all the scenes in that area instead of activating that scene in the targeted area?
I mean this could be confusing in general. In the automations and scripts, you would have area selection twice. Not sure what you mean by the card, there’s no special card for activating scenes in core, is there. You would probably need a script to add this option to the dashboard anyway.
Yeah thinking about this some more - why can’t you just have the most granular scenes for each area, then activate multiple of them? Am I missing some use case where this would be cumbersome, other than having multiple scene activation calls?
You can do that. This is just a better way.
For one, it requires more scenes that way. If they are usually used together, you use a naming scheme like “Movie Time - Living Room”, “Movie Time - Kitchen”, “Movie Time - Dining Room”, etc. Just the naming scheme implies that they ought to logically be one scene.
You could have a scene that is slightly different depending on the time of day. Instead of two scenes, “Welcome Home - Afternoon” and “Welcome Home - Evening”, you have one scene called “Welcome Home”, but in the evening you choose to include the front porch light.
The fact that I can so readily come up with examples shows that this would be a useful feature. You don’t NEED it, but it would make things much cleaner in my install
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Sure, I guess you could also use a label with the scenes, and activate the label. I already do have a lot of such scenes which is fairly messy, but I can see how it would simplify things if I didn’t have to have multiple scenes.
To your earlier point, this logic can also currently be done in a script. So, I think it is important to note that this is not fundamentally new, but rather a way to make scenes cleaner and more organized.
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This is very similar to the WTH suggestion I was going to make, which is to apply a scene to a specific set of devices but it would work in the same way as if it included areas.
My use case would be as follows:
Several areas have motion sensors which automatically turn a set of lights on and off.
I have a set of scenes, for simplicity we’ll say two: Bright and Dim.
Depending on the time of day, I want to apply scene Bright or Dim when motion is detected in by a specific sensor.
If we assume there are two motion sensors for two areas, with the current implementation I would have to create 4 scenes:
- Bright Area A
- Dim Area A
- Bright Area B
- Dim Area B
Then based on the motion and some conditional (e.g. time based) I would pick between Bright or Dim for that specific area. Add to the number of scenes and number of areas and you end up with an endless list of scenes.
If this functionality were to be implemented both scene management as well as conditionals could be greatly simplified.
Create 1 Bright and 1 Dim Scene
Add all scenes to an input select
Add an automation which triggers on the time based condition and updates the input select selected value globally.
Then for each motion sensor, create an automation which applies [currently selected theme] to the specific area or devices that matter.
In theory this could be managed using string interpolation and naming convention but is still a nightmare to maintain.
With this proposed solution you could have centrally managed scenes and centrally managed conditions and the automations to turn on/off lights become very simple triggers where the only variable changing across them would be what the triggering entity is and what devices/area should have the scene applied to.
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There is a HACS custom integration called ‘scene presets’’ that already sort of does this. It uses scene presets from Philips Hue and lets you apply them to areas.
Something similar, with an easy interface to design the presets and/or copy them from existing scenes would be a great addition to HA!
I just downloaded and gave this try. It works very similarly to how I would want scenes to function. But only in the way that I can pick an area. But obviously I want to keep the functionality of scenes outside my light entities, use this functionality in my dashboard/automations, and be able to create my own scenes.
I think this is a great proof of concept! It lacks a lot of the nuanced functionality that home assistant excels at.
A bit late to the party. I see a lot f more complex use cases in this thread, but what I myself miss is literally the title of this WTH.
Use case: I have multiple “Cinema” scenes for TV watching. E.g. “Cozy”, “Dark”, “Bright”.
Each scene turns specific lights in the living room on or off with certain brightness and colors.
But all these scenes have something in common: I want all other lights in the house to be turned off except for the living room. This means that I have to manually add each light/light group, one by one.
Ideally, I would add each light/light group from the living room separately, and then add “First Floor”, “Kitchen”, etc as areas with all their lights turned off. This is already possible in automations and that’s what I’m using (if a cinema scene is activated, turn off all other lights). But it would be nice to not need an automation just for that.
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@Mayhem_SWE I agree re: a potentially different paradigm, although I don’t view it as a super-scene with masking. Going back to first principles:
A smart room philosophically speaking, knows what it has (lights, HVAC, A/V etc) and what it can do with them to be quiet, loud, bright, dim, cozy, welcoming, informative, etc. The capability gamut.
A user brings intent and context into the room (e.g. my “loud” might not be the same as your “loud”, and I like lights off when watching evening news while you might like them just dimmed a bit.)
So the user should be able to take their intent and context from one room to another, e.g. start watching a video in the office and finish it in the man-cave. Or start news in the kitchen and finish in the bedroom.
Multiple users occupying the same room creates some interesting challenges in terms of how they negotiate competing intents and contexts in the same room, but to me the desire to have this has merit, and I’ve seen some premier residences where the house attempts to make the music you’re listening to, follow you around, and lights to a cruder extent.