How to skip scenes on Lighting Controller from one input

[Rob_in]

Hi,

Our house has an open plan kitchen/dining/lounge/hall area. It makes sense (I think) to have a single lighting controller block control the scenes in this one space.

Let's say I program in these scenes:

- Cooking

- Eating

- Relaxing

- Watching TV

- Night circulation

They are all pretty self explanatory, but the last is to be used to turn on just a few dimmed spots near the edge of the room (the 'hall') where you would walk from the bedroom to front door for example.

We'll put controls quite close to each area but I'd like the switch closest to the bedroom to cycle through the last three scenes only ('Relaxing', 'Watching TV' & 'Night circulation'). This switch is far from the kitchen so it doesn't make sense to include that scene. If 'Cooking' happened to be the current scene, then skip right to 'Relaxing' when this control is pressed. In fact, I'd like that if everything is off then that control starts off with 'Night circulation' because it's likely you might have just left the bedroom to walk through the house to get your shoes on and go for an early walk or something.

Anyhow - so how does one achieve this?

It's not possible to connect multiple lighting outputs to multiple scene controllers and have a different scene controller for each physical control.

I notice the Lighting Controller has digital inputs or an analogue input to select specific scenes, and one can use a sequencer (plus other bits) to control these. So if you want a switch to skip scenes you can connect that to a sequencer and use this to select specific scene inputs. It does work, but is hardly elegant. Anyone know a better way?

Is this also the way you would have to do things if you wanted to skip specific scenes at specific times of the day for example?

Cheers,

Robin

[Duncan]

can i suggest using a lighting controller for each area, then use a selector / radio buttons/ real buttons to control a 'group' function that controls the various individual lighing controller using the Als input

each Als input will change the scene, but there can be multiple inputs from different sources to a single Als so you can create different area buttons that control different lighting controller combinations.

if you use an analog multiplexer to drive Als for each lighting controller, you can change the values applied to a particular analog input by using an analog timer/schedule for different scenes at different times, along with some of the analog inputs having fixed choices

ill post up a screenshot if you like to give you an idea

[Rob_in]

Yes please :)

[Duncan]

[Rob_in]

Thanks. But yes, that's pretty complicated. Gives me some good pointers though.

On Tuesday, 27 December 2016 10:59:39 UTC+1, Duncan wrote:

[smartbusinesstools.be]

This is something requested by most of our customers. The software is missing an important feature here: the lighting controller should be recursive.

A 'Scene' can be thought of as a single lamp dimmed to the scene value.

So if the output of a lighting controller could also be a scene number (besides a switch, a dim percentage or an RGB value), then you could simply control scenes of scenes, using all functionality of the lighting controller block, including motion detectors and the ability to make changes from within the app.

You can actually build something close to that by setting the outputs of a higher level lighting controller to 0-10V dimmers, with steps of 1, and connecting those to the AIs of the lower level lighting controllers, but there are a number of problems and it's a lot of work to work around them, e.g.

- when you change the state of the lower level lighting controller, the high level lighting controller does not know and will not change to 'Custom scene'

- when re-selecting a scene at the higher level lighting controller or selecting a different scene but one or more output values remain the same, the attached lower level lighting controllers will not react because their AIs' remain unchanged.

[Rob_in]

I'm not sure it should be recursive for the reasons you mention.

I messed around some more just now. Used AQs with Equal block to detect when a scene that should be skipped was activated and used that to create a pulse to select the next scene. It works, but isn't instant so in real life I imagine you would get a flicker of that scene to skip.

Clearly this is not ideal and not catered for so I have re-thought the requirement. Think am just going to have to have separate lighting controllers for each zone and where one can walk between the two zones put controls for both. Basically treating the open area as different rooms. Not quite what I had in mind though :(

[smartbusinesstools.be]

I guess the use of the term 'recursive' did not explain well what I meant: it should be possible to create:

- a separate lighting controller for each zone in a open area, grouping lamps into 'zone scenes'

- a separate lighting controller for each room, grouping lamps and 'zone scenes' into 'room scenes'

- a separate lighting controller for each floor, grouping 'room scenes' into 'floor scenes'

- a separate lighting controller for each building, grouping 'floor scenes' into 'building scenes'

[njamessimpson]

Very helpful topic. Agree with Seb re ideal programming from Loxone.

Just trying to figure out buttons in a very similar situation. I have 3 zones (dining, kitchen, lounge) in a large room.

Ideally I'd use the mdt glass switch 2 as a main control on entry (easy use for guests and sells house well). Thought this might have
- a group button for all zone scenes
- one for each zone
- external lights
- external water feature
- kitchen fan
Need to think about how best to manage dimming.

Then 2 individual switches elsewhere for group scenes.

For my clarity, if set up 3 zones as individuals LCs and then use a separate button to group per Duncan's programming, is it possible to configure above?

May be simpler to just use a single lighting control, set as one zone, simplify the buttons (accepting no individual zone buttons) and use scenes across the entire space (kitchen prep, informal eating, movie mode etc).

Separately. Is it possible for a switch to prioritise a scene. I.e. If next to projector it automatically puts projector. puts lighting in movie mode etc.

Thanks

[Rob_in]

This is very interesting, because since I started this thread and have discovered skipping isn't really possible I came up with pretty much the same idea as you. Ie:

There is a control in each 'zone', 4 inputs which I would propose did this:

1. Standard input to that zone's light controller (on/off/switch scene just for that zone).

2. Input to cycle whole area (multiple zones) scene.

3 & 4. reserved for blind control

For the function of switch 2 I was going to try this... when you press that it goes to a 'master' controller that implements scene numbers for each zone. I wanted to add some smarter logic to this so let's say your flow is this:

- Kitchen lights are on (you're preparing food) as are lounge area (family are relaxing)

- Food is served so you hit the individual scene control in the dining area.

- The family come to dine so you hit the 'whole area scene' button which triggers 'dining' mode (either dims or turns off lounge/kitchen, leaving dining on).

The thing with this is that the 'master' controller will have multiple activities to cycle through. From my original post those are:

- Cooking

- Eating

- Relaxing

- Watching TV

- Night circulation

Ideally in the user case I mention above you wouldn't want to cycle back through 'cooking' to get to 'eating'.

What I'd like to do is have a 'next activity' memory flag. When the individual scene button (button 1) on any of the zone's controllers is pressed, set the 'next activity' memory flag (but do nothing more) for the master controller to be something relevant to the zone that has just been switched. When the master scene button is then pressed, go to that activity first.

In the case of the flow I describe above, this would mean pressing the dinning area's scene button would cause 'eating' to be set in the 'next activity' memory flag. Then one could press the 'master activity' control and it would skip directly to 'eating'.

After dinner, one could use any of the master controls to cycle the whole area to 'Relaxing' or 'Watching TV' or one could turn on the longe zone (with it's button number 1), which would cause the 'next activity' flag to be set to something that goes on in the lounge zone (Relaxing or Watching TV) and then press the 'next activity' button to activate that for the whole area.

In this way the individual zones can be controlled as usual, but the entire area can also be controlled (in a somewhat less granular way) from any of the controllers too. All using only 2 inputs.

I don't really care about dimming controls, BTW, because I feel if you have to manually adjust dimming from the room controller you've failed to setup your scenes properly. Plus, one can simply pull out a smartphone or at worst walk to a tablet controller fixed to the wall to do specific things.

Does all that make sense and sound plausible?

I'm sure the setting of 'next activity' memory flag and then decoding those activities into scenes for each zone won't be pretty, but it will be possible.

Cheers,

Robin

[Duncan]

in a 4 zone open plan room, i have 4 lighting controllers, 1 for each zone set up with a variety of 'moods'

each zone has its own buttons for moods - 2 in fact, 1 goes up through brighter moods, the other down - that way i can push the down button to get full brightness, the reduce to less bright moods, the other i start with the dimmest mood and get brighter - press and hold turns the lights on full from any mood, and double click turns them off

each zone also has a button that selects a favourite 'scene' which consists of preselected 'moods' in each zone, and sets the favourite (lets say evening) in all 4 zones for an evening when im unlikely to choose other options

each zone has another button that cycles through 3 groups of settings 'scenes'  for all 4 zones together - dim (evening), medium (whatever) and fully on, and a double click of either turns all zones off

using a zones buttons overrides a previously set scene, and pressing a scene resets any changed zone back to the group scene.

also the mdt buttons have a 'panic' or pat mode that is another button, and each zone switch has its 'panic' set to a particular scene for that zone - so tapping the kitchen light turns on a reasonably bright breakfast/cooking mood

[Rob_in]

Yeah, that does sound very similar to what I'm thinking. Only I will only have one button per zone and per... what you called 'mood' and I called 'activity' because I don't mind having to quickly flick through them. That said, there will always be scope to add more physical buttons if this becomes a pain.

Don't suppose you can share how you got your 'mood' logic to drive the child 'zones'?

Cheers,

Robin

[Duncan]

[Faradite Ltd]

Hi Robin,

The simplest way to implement what you would like is to use the state block as all the logic is neatly in one place. In the attached example file I have created 2 switches, 5 scenes with 4 simple on/off lighting circuits. When a switch is pressed the state block has to decide what to do, this is where all the logic goes. In the first line of the state block it says if switch one is pressed and the current selected scene is 0 then move to scene 1. You will see from looking at the rest of the logic that I have implemented switch 1 to skip scene 3 and switch 2 to skip scene 4. By connecting switch 1 & 2 to a multi click block you still keep the double click for room all off and triple click for whole house off.

I hope you find this file useful. I have tested it in simulation and it seems to work well.

You could of course add a schedule block to one of the state blocks inputs to make more complex logic for particular times of day.

Thanks
Chris