Scene Management in Toolkit

Hi everyone,

I'm keen to improve the management of scenes in Toolkit. I find in my own home that I dont have my scenes completely under control. Some scenes because of their complexity are spanning plates (half of the scene on one plate and half on another), tied together with Action Selectors.

I have a C-Touch going in soon and will move all scenes into that which will help, but not solve the issue as I wish to retain some scenes in "wireless world" for their current flexibility.. I think we can improve Toolkit.

I have a few ideas, but am keen to hear if anyone has some further thoughts before I draft a spec for the work.

My current thoughts are:

1. Extend the Tag Database so that a Scene can be stored in the Database.. independently of where it might actually be implemented on the Network. This scene would have no limitations, as many groups as you want. I will refer to these Database scenes as "Logical Scenes".

2. To each Network Node in the Browser add a "Logical Scenes" Node that allows you to browse, maintain, fire Logical Scenes (into the Network). Add the ability to capture Logical Scenes from the Network.

3. Extend Toolkit to give it the ability to "deploy" a Logical Scene to a unit or group of Units. A wireless plate, 1 or more Neo's, a Scene Controller etc. Toolkit would provide warnings if the logical scene isnt 'compatible' with the selected units. If a scene spans more than one unit Toolkit would join the scenes with appropriate Action Selectors.

4. Extend the Tag DB so that the deployment of a Logical Scene to a Unit/Units can be recorded. These logical scenes would also be available from within the C-Touch/HomeGate/SchedulePlus software for deployment.

5. Extend Toolkit so that when programming an Input Unit to "set" a scene a drop down box of logical scenes can be shown. The software would manage assignment of Action Selectors etc.

The caveat with this approach is that once you moved to using a "logical scene" approach you'd need to stick with that approach and not fiddle with individual scene programming on participant C-Bus Units.

Having only worked on my own C-Bus Installation (40 wireless units, 4 Multisensors, 3 external PIRs, C-Touch, 2 Bus Couplers) I'm keen to hear from anyone with some alternative ideas or extensions to the concepts herein.

 

Logicial scenes

Duncan
We nearly always install a ctouch these days (some of the cost is offset against not having to install a pc interface) in which all scenes are stored, these scenes are then used as logical scenes and controlled via flag groups from all cbus devices, i.e. the bedtime scene is triggered from a neo beside the bed or the ctouch button.
This works very well and gives us control of where the scene is store and setting up of the scene.

One suggestion: Some way of ramping the whole scene up and down over a set time.
It takes too much time to go and set each load to say 4 seconds then maybe copy that scene and change the times in the second scene to 8 seconds. If I could ramp (not nudge) the scene I would not have to add the ramp times to each group and could use the same scene many times with the different scene ramp time.

Also bug in beta if you do not enter a scene name, set group then ok, crashes with garbage error No 14621

dave