WB70:
If you create a Routine without any sort of triggers to execute it? And you simply press the button to run that Routine whether from inside of ST or as a widget on your device. What is it? It’s a Scene. It opens the garage door, unlocks these locks, turn these lights on, starts the music player. It’s completed.
Now if you add a trigger let’s say based on motion. You are setting a scene based on an action. The only things that a Routine doesn’t allow you to do is set the brightness levels and the color.
That’s why to me the Scenes as they are right now are a complete waste of space, because simply adding brightness controls and color to what we know as the existing Routines and then they could have just renamed Routines to Scenes. Would have been so much easier.
Agreed, routines really are a variant of scenes. I’m pretty sure, although I’m not certain, that the only reason they broke scenes out now was because of the local processing issue.
Because to be honest people have been having this exact same conversation for literally years, like the following thread from 2014:
Greetings! I’m a brand new Smartthings user, but I’ve used home automation devices for about 15 years. In the case of Smartthings, I think that’s more of a hindrance than a benefit, because it looks like Smartthings is designed very differently from any of the solutions I’ve used before.
Anyway, here’s my basic question, which for some reason I just can’t figure out: how do I set up a “scene?” I don’t know if ST calls them something else, but I’m coming from using Vera, where everything was pretty much divided into devices and scenes. This is limiting in some ways but exactly what I need in others. Most of the time, I don’t actually want my automation solution to think too much for me. Sometimes I just want to be able to hit a button and have all the lights in a room turn on to preset dim…
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