jgreco
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Joined: December 22 2009
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Posts: 18
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| Posted: December 22 2009 at 09:20 | IP Logged
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New(ish) to Powerhome. Trying to use Powerhome to add some smarts to our Insteon network.
In particular, I want to implement a very particular definition of "scene," or perhaps more accurately, status.
We have a bunch of 2486D KPL's. Most of them are configured as 3="ALL LIGHTS ON", 4="ALL LIGHTS OFF", or possibly "ROOM ON" and "ROOM OFF", with 5 usually being a local scene toggle and 6 usually being a scene toggle to control nearby lights to navigate the house at night. I'm fine with the KPL buttons proxying through PH and a small reasonable extra delay, as long as I can find a way to keep PH running reliably, that is...
What I really want is for the KPL LED's to accurately reflect status. For example, if I press "ALL LIGHTS OFF," that ought to light, which it does. If I subsequently turn on the bathroom lights, the A/L/OFF LED should extinguish. If I turn off the bathroom lights, the A/L/OFF LED should re-light, because we're now back in a situation where all lights are off. And I want scenes accurately reported like this for the whole network.
So, step one, Insteon groups. I made three groups for every "scene". One is thing_GRP, which controls actual devices in that scene. The next is thing_OFF_LED, and the third is thing_ON_LED. This allows me to have complete control over all the relevant resources from within PH, and it all works perfectly. Side note: The Insteon Explorer is a hell of a tool to learn, but it is THE best Swiss army knife for Insteon I've seen.
Step two: Insteon input. Created links from every device (and for the KPL's, also 3/4/5/6) to the PLM. This provides reliable notice to PH of any local state changes. That works wonderfully too.
At this point, I've theoretically got a completely controllable lighting network. To play with it, I then did:
Step three: Macros. "ALL LIGHTS ON" gets mapped to
10 INSTEON GRP/ALL LTS GRP/On
20 INSTEON GRP/ALL LTS ON LED/On
30 INSTEON GRP/ALL LTS OFF LED/Off
All the macros do the intended things and generate some basic keypad scene status reporting.
Step four: Triggers. Attach two triggers to each KPL button, one for on, one for off. This all works too. Fantastic!
So I stopped at this point, to learn a little bit more about what's going on within PH. To make a long story short, I pulled up the Device Status window, and my socks nearly got knocked off: PH was keeping track of scene status in nearly the way I want. When I manually light all the members of the KITCHEN_GRP, for example, PH notes in the Device Status also that KITCHEN_GRP is on. Whoo, that's cool.
So this brings up two issues:
1) Obviously there's got to be a way to propagate that knowledge out. Is there a way to trigger based on a state change or something like that? I'd like to have PH push a status change out to the LED's when its own internal status changes.
2) And this is the bigger question. PH is showing a group as ON when all its members are in the ON state. However, it shows the group as OFF when any of its members are not in the ON state. For something like an "ALL LIGHTS OFF" group, that logic isn't quite what I want; I'd like the ALL OFF LED to light only when all lights are OFF.
I have some more experimentation to do with 2, but wanted to post an inquiry here before I got all Rube Goldberg.
I'm thinking there has to be a clever way to get PH to do the heavy lifting for me, since it is already keeping track of scene states.
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Topic: Insteon scene status
