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!