Scenes Beta!

Announcements
129

in all fairness, you are more pointing out a flaw in their upgrade process than proving your point.

In the age of always online devices, where notifications are as easy as a ping, you want us to believe that it’s not practical to say “hey, there’s an upgrade for your product, here’s the change log”… all the while the android / apple store and pretty much every online service does this already? or even a basic email to all users? email was a required field for a reason…

I mean, are you really going to hide behind legal terms for a lack of after thought?..

130

This is an endless battle that will continue until the end of time. 100% of people won’t be satisfied. For the Family Tab, you are going to have those that did use the functionality and weren’t explicitly told it was being removed, and are disappointed, and those who never once clicked in the Tab because it was useless to them, and then you have some that saw it and said what a waste of real estate, glad it’s gone. Then you have those that see it missing and say hmmm, let me just add those devices to a Room and be done with it, and others who will complain about it. This is not say that anyone is wrong in the opinion they share about it, whether good or bad, but this is life all and there is no pleasing all of you 100%. That’s just not going to ever happen. You can argue that their fundamentals or methodology of not notifying anyone prior to removing something doesn’t make sense to you or that it is completely wrong, but when they introduce something you were waiting for without an announcement, do you complain about that?

You have the option to not like a company’s process, methodology or idealogy and can go elsewhere. You have the freedom of choice and in turn the company has their own choice as to how, what and when they deliver.

It’s been said many times today, but if a company could deliver 100% of everything that every single person wanted or didn’t want to 100% of the customer base, the product would never exist because it would be an impossible deliverable to achieve. The fact that this company in my opinion is finally taking strides to move in a positive forward direction in the last few months alone and from what I have seen from the beginning (I had one foot out the door myself a few months ago) is a 180° turn around.

This same thing happens in our lives everyday outside of technology. Little Johnny was used to sitting at the old chipped dining room table with wobbly chairs and had the perfect height for his elbows to rest on the table when eating dinner. Johnny’s parents decided that they wanted a brand new table that wasn’t chipped and had an extendable leaf for more people and had chairs that no longer wobbled. They didn’t tell Little Johnny that they were going to buy a brand new table and chairs and the next night at dinner, Little Johnny was happy that his chair no longer wobbled, but he was very unhappy that his elbows didn’t rest on the table at the same height and was slightly uncomfortable. The rest of the house was ecstatic for the change. Moral of the story - You can’t please everyone and even if they told Johnny ahead of time they were going to purchase the table, he still would have been disappointed. Did the family have to get Johnny’s approval, NO! Sorry for the goofy analogy, but SUCH IS LIFE folks!

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131

Nope; I’m not hiding; just pointing out a couple facts:

  1. The existence of the Terms means that every Customer knows what they bought into.

  2. SmartThings is a Cloud Service which means that some feature changes (even front-end features) are not deferrable by customers. Parts of the SmartThings App are dynamic (e.g., Smart Lighting is a SmartApp that runs in the back-end, even though it looks like a part of the front-end).

  3. Believe it or not, sending bulk-email is a big risk for SmartThings. Even well-reputed non-marketing fully authorized bulk-emailed messages are often, frustratingly, automatically considered by email services to be spam. Once this categorization is made, essential emails like password change requests and help desk responses can be forever lost.

  4. Speaking from experience with ActionTiles customers, the vast majority of Customers (80%? 95%?) really don’t care. Or they simply don’t care enough to write to: Support@SmartThings.com to record their concerns so that next time SmartThings might consider more advance notification.

Hint: Please contact Support@SmartThings.com if you’d like notice in the future. That’s the channel they listen to!

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132

This is the bane of my existence at work as a lot of what we do is email… Even our own internal emails are hitting filters on our hosted Exchange solution right now. Ugh.

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134

:worried:

…or ten characters to that effect.

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135

anyone know if the scenes work with Google Home? I’m not seeing them in my list of devices being pulled over to GH from ST.

136

You have to trigger the scene by using a Routine.
You can include a scene within a routine, but at this time you can not directly trigger a scene outside of the Scenes tab in the app other than through the routine, that I am aware of.

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137

Nice. I didn’t notice that they added Scene triggering to routines. I was thinking that these scenes would be a more efficient way to replace some of the routines that I was using, but I guess it’s going to be a combination of the two for the time being.

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138

do scenes over rule ‘Smart Lighting’ rules?

For example if I create a ‘movietime’ scene in which I have 3-4 light/switches state off, will the ‘Smart Lighting’ rule that says turn on when there’s motion be overruled/ignored?

139

Yeah, I was just going over whether to even bother with scenes. They’re basically routines that don’t turn off, so I was like WTF do I even need scenes for?

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140

The only way round this that i can see is to create a ‘Movietime’ mode.
Then in your Smart Lighting rule select it to run in all the modes apart from MovieTime.
Then it will ignore the Smart Lighting rule when you are in ‘Movietime’ mode.

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141

A routine treats all lights as a single group, so they all get set to the same dim setting, color, and color temperature.

A scene lets you give each light its own individual setting.

There are other ways to do that, of course, particularly webcore, but this is just matching some of the basic functionality in other home automation systems.

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142

Oh in that case then not cool, not sure I’m finding scenes useful in my case for now…

will need to read other’s use cases for scenes to understand its usefulness.

143

It’s just my take on it.
I may be completely wrong, who knows…
As for scenes, I cannot find a need for them in my setup.
Probably with more complex and ambitious setups scenes are a great addition to ST.

144

My recommendation is this:

  • If you used Routines to just turn on or off a set of Lights (or other Switches); then you should move that to a Scene.

  • If the Routine used a Trigger, then create a new Routine with that Trigger, but have it call the Scene instead of the individual lights.

In other words: A Scene is a great way to organize. It abstracts the switch and light preferences from whatever is Activating the Scene. Right now a Scene can be activated by: Icon Press, Smart Lighting, and/or Routine. (And Routines can be triggered by an ActionTiles Routine Tile or Routine List Tile, which is how our customers can already use Tiles to Activate Scenes now).

145

Scenes is a needed feature. I think of it as a subset for Routines, which admittedly I hardly bothered with before Scenes.

In my home, lighting is everything! Can’t be too bright in the night time and has to be bright enough in the daytime. We have a mixture of 3000kv, 5000kv and 2700kv bulbs. We have several RGBWW setups and a couple of Hue Color Floods.

Having this much variety can give many different moods and settings. Scenes make it easy to manage the various moods for each room. Yeah, you can do this with virtual switches and webCoRE but having the ability to do it quickly within the app is handy.

Example:
Den we have:
Ceiling Light
Mantle Light
RGB Lighting Behind TV
Lamp on Dimmable Outlet
2 x Hue Blooms

I could say: Alexa, set ceiling lights to 20%, set lamp to 10%, set bloom 1 to ambient green; set bloom 2 to dark ambient green, set tv light to blue, set tv Light to 21%, set…

Or I could say: Alexa turn on Ron TV

The beauty of Scenes is that each family member may like the room set up differently but many of the settings overlap.

We all like the ceiling light at 20% so there is no need of redoing that because there is already a Scene called Den Ceiling 20%…

Once you find that perfect light setting, just store it in a Scene and then use Routines to trigger the Scenes.

Routines are more rigid.
For Example:
Ron TV Routine also has these going on:
Turn On Fireplace
Turn Off Den Automation
Turn Off Hallway Automation
Turn Off Kitchen Automation
Turn Off Various Lights
Turn On Fire TV
Set Downstairs Heat to 72

That’s a lot going on just to watch TV but we have about 4 different TV watching Routines!

I like it and I am actually using Routines again because this is actually faster than using webCoRE!

YMMV

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146

good real world use case…
scenes are starting to click*** for me.

***see what I did there. :sweat_smile:

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147

The only issue with the current implementation of Scenes is that you can’t pre-set the lighting by normal means, get everything set up, and then capture the state.

Imagine this implementation:

You have your devices organized by room. You set your lights in each location that you want to capture to the desired settings.
You then “Create new scene”. The options come up for both manual creation and capture. You choose capture, check the boxes for the rooms you want to be part of the scene, and hit Done. All devices in those rooms get captured at their current state, and you now have your scene.

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148

veddy nice, veddddy nice.

that would be a killer feature implementation.

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149

I do this with webCoRE with store attributes to local or global store. It is an extremely useful tool. It would be soooooooooooooooo freaking cool to have that feature in the native Scenes Section which should be in the Automation Section and give me back my freaking Family Tab in the Home Section…