advanced scenes, keypads and binding

[ziocan]

Hi there,

sorry for the n00b question that follows. I am trying to control two dimmable WIFI bulbs with a single button of my 3 button wireless keypad. If I bind one of the bulbs to the keypad, I automatically get on/off and dimming via press-and-hold.  But of course you can only bind a single light to a button so I thought to use advanced lighting scenes to do the same, so that I could control the two bulbs with the same button.

So I created a scene, added the two bulbs as the load, set it to ramp to 100%, then I created the toggle counterpart that ramps down to zero. If I activate/deactivate the main scene the bulbs turn on and off as expected. I set each bulb to be tracked (when on in the main scene, when off in the toggle scene).

My problem comes when I try to bind the keypad button to the scene. I tried to bind the button to the "toggle" virtual button of the main scene ,and when I click the button the lights turn on correctly, but I cannot turn them off with another click. Also I cannot press and hold to dim them. 

What am I doing wrong? By the way, the idea here is to use only a single button to control the scene....

Thanks in advance for your help,

Rick

 

[South Africa C4 user]

I think what is missing is you setting up a toggle scene in Advanced Lighting

[ziocan]

I do have a toggle scene. With the button, I can toggle to ON but not OFF (when button is linked to toggle link for main scene) or I can toggle to OFF (when button is linked to toggle link for toggle scene) but not ON.  In both cases toggle only works one way.... and no press-and-hold dimming

[thegreatheed]

Or scene tracking may not be set up correctly. If the system doesn't track your scenes, it can't toggle them 2 ways.

[ziocan]

Main scene: track any load, each bulb has tracking when on  (this scene ramps up to 100%)

Toggle scene: track any load, each bulb has tracking when off (this scene fades down to 0%)

Still it doesn't toggle, it only does one way for both scenes. Activate/deactivate in composer works fine, but from keypad button only one way.

Could it be, that the actual tracking fails due to a bulbs driver's bug?

If I bind the single bulbs to the keypad button the toggle works flawlessly...

 

Thanks

Rick

[ziocan]

Anyone? This really puzzles me.

[Cyknight]

Wifi Bulbs? What Wifi Bulbs - I'd indeed say the issue is that current state simply isn't tracked. Easy enough to check - activate the scene in composer, see if the state changes on BOTH scenes.

[ziocan]

I am testing with LIFX bulbs.  In fact, when I activate the scene in Composer, the lights turn on, but "CurrentStatus" remains INACTIVE.

[Cyknight]

Then I'd have to say the state isn't tracked properly. Whether that is an error in the driver, or a limitation of the device I cannot say.

[ziocan]

All I have done, binding wise, is to bind one of the buttons of my keypad to the TOGGLE virtual button of the LIFX driver.
 Would that be enough to allow the bulb to work with advanced lighting scenes?  the single bulb works fine with this binding, including ramp up and down,
 but for scenes it will only activate the main scene and never toggle to the other scene.  Just wanted to ensure that I'm not missing something about binding here.

Thanks

Rick

[ziocan]

I decided to go the old way and configured one bulb to follow the other using variables, so that the keypad button operates one bulb and the other will play along. Works for me.

[Cyknight]

2 hours ago, ziocan said:

 Would that be enough to allow the bulb to work with advanced lighting scenes?

Well, other than obviously not being the case - no. The 'toggle' depends on the last known action for a light, scene tracking requires 2-way feedback.

 

35 minutes ago, ziocan said:

I decided to go the old way and configured one bulb to follow the other using variables, so that the keypad button operates one bulb and the other will play along. Works for me.

Yup, back to the old days - but if it works for what you need, nothing wrong with that at all.

[ziocan]

I am still trying to understand why the single bulb's status  is tracked just fine (in navigator UI, for example) but when I put it inside a scene, its ON or OFF status is not tracked at all.

The scene is INVOKED but never ACTIVATED although the bulb turns out just fine.  Is there a specific event that I need to send to the LightV2 proxy in order to update the scene status, or is LIGHT_LEVEL enough?

Thanks again

Rick

[Cyknight]

Same answer as above. Individual light state is tracked based on last action - have you tried to see if using an outside of C4 control changes the light's state at all?

Beyond that, advanced scene tracking requires different feedback/driver properties. Remember that Advanced scenes and tracking for them is FAR newer than basic light connections and has it's own implementation

[ziocan]

I will try that (now I'm at office) but I believe that if I turn the bulbs on via their own cloud interface, the driver sends notification to C4 and it all works.

Is there any sample driver for a light that uses V2 proxy and advanced scenes and is properly traked? I would like to have a look at the code to understand how it works.

Rick

[Cyknight]

6 hours ago, ziocan said:

Is there any sample driver for a light that uses V2 proxy and advanced scenes and is properly traked?

Not that I'm aware of.

 

I did remember one little trick - try setting it to ignore scene ramp/fade in the scene, see if that works (assuming it's enabled now)

[ziocan]

Unfortunately that doesn't make a difference. But thanks for the suggestion.

Rick