New update: easy daily rhythms with preset/recall (2024-04-14T10:34)
Let’s say you want your “On” button to trigger the high brightness scene during the morning, a warmer scene during evening and something dim with colours at night. That’s a few routines checking if the button was pressed between X and Y hours to activate one scene or another.
Preset / Recall simplifies this not having to worry about time periods at all! If you know WiZ lights, it’s my rendition of the custom rhythms feature.
Preset/Recall concept: Preset Scene actions store the scene number in memory without activation, meaning the lights will not turn on when scheduled. The activation happens only when you press the button with the Recall Preset action assigned, typically the “On” button, effectively having a button with different behaviour during the day.
A two-step process:
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Schedule a Preset for the scene when the period starts. For instance, after sunrise pick the action Preset Scene 1, later at around 15:00 Preset Scene 2, at sunset Preset Scene 3, at 22:00 Preset Scene 4. The periods are implicit and you don’t need multiple routines per room either, you can use the same routine that runs at sunset to preset scenes in the office, the bedroom and the living room.
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Assign the Recall Preset action to the button that “turns on” the room.
Now, every time you want to turn on a room, it will go into the scene belonging to that time of the day. All with few simple routines and no time period checks.
Would look like this:
Hope you like it! The old preset/recall mode in settings has been removed in favour of the new Preset and Recall commands, hopefully nobody was using the old mode yet.
Just like with the IKEA drivers I believe the Virtual Scene Switcher is feature complete now and fills the gap I found in SmartThings when it comes to scene management. From now on it will probably be bugfixes or minor additions.
Note that the driver, capabilities and presentations may need few hours to auto-update and until everything is updated it may not work as expected.
Edit: If you need extreme reliability, keep your time period conditions. This aims for simplicity in lighting scenarios. While the preset is persisted, it may not survive a sudden power loss of the hub. In that case, the previous preset or the default scene would be used.
Edit 2: In October 2024 SmartThings added a “Daily routine” which fits great with the scene switcher since you can create the whole schedule of presets in one routine: