I’ve been playing around in the apps available and can’t find what I’m looking for. What I am looking for is a way to set ALL the dimmers to a level (say 20%) when a mode is entered (say night mode) without turning on the lights. That way when the light is turned on during the night (automatically from smart things or manually by pressing the switch) the light will only turn on to 20%. The only app I have found is one that turns the light on to the current dimmer setting then dims the light to your setting you selected in the app. That kind of defeats the purpose of not getting blinded in the middle of the night by a bright light. I have been playing around trying to write the code for it but seem to be missing something. It will not run when I go into Night mode. This should be simple code but I’ve never wrote in groovy. 3 user inputs, which dimmers, what dimmer level and what mode. Then when mode = “mode selected” set all the “dimmers” to the new “dimmer level”. I guess the simplest question is can I change the dimmer setting on a light switch without turning the light on? If I can, can someone please help.
Setting dimmer level when in selected mode while light is off?
Can only speak to the GE Dimmers, I worked on a device handler for these.
If you send a set dim event it will always turn on the light to that level. I have not found a way around it.
The solution I end up using is motion triggered events, which will trigger to the dim level.
I have to agree with @desertblade. I am actually writing a SmartApp to nice small light controlling app based on rules. I spent a lot of time programming it to either turn on lights, turn them off, or in the case of a dimmer ignore the on / off (when just setting the level). All of my dimmers turn on when I call the setLevel() method.
@mebaddog2002 - Based on what I said above, my app won’t help, but you can look at my code to see how I catch the mode change event. See lines 72, 163, & 193-206.
BTW - The app works, still testing and have to finish the code for the color lights. It basically turns lights, switches, dimmers, color lights on based on 1 to N triggers (motion, accelerometers, contact, mode changes, routines executed, then turns them off after a specified time (if you want them to turn off).
Well that stinks. Must be hard coded into SmartThings to do that. On your app, when changing dimmer level with the light off. Does your light first turn on to the previous level then dim or brighten to the new level? Or does it go straight to the new dimmer level?
Its in the switch. It is how it handles the SwitchMultilevelSet zwave command.
If you use something like smart lighting/CoRe it will just go right to that level. I am assuming its the same with the above app.
It should go right to the level, but it might also depend on the light / dimmer.