Can you use a single button to turn on and off a light scene?

[akg4y]

If you have a lighting scene, lets say with three sets of lights, A, B, and C, can you program it such that pushing a single button on a two button once turns everything on, and pushing it again turns everything off?

The complication would be if one or two of the lights was already on, etc..

I figure it would require a variable for the button status such as varButton with values of 0 (all off) or 1 (all on).

When you press the button it changes the variable to the other value (if varButton = 0 then set varButton = 1 and vice versa), and also has a set of commands for each light based on the status of the variable such as:

If varButton = 1 then:

If A is off turn it on

If B is off turn it on

If C is off turn it on

If varButton = 0 then

If A is on turn it off

If B is on turn it off

If C is on turn it off

Forgive me if this sounds like a 3rd grader, but I dont even have my C4 system yet so I dont know what the actual terms are in the Composer HE. My dealer said that a single button could not be used to turn on and off entire scenes but with variables it seems like it could be done...

[jbs]

I don't want to discount the possibility that your dealer misunderstood your request, but if he/she really thinks that there's not a way for a single button to turn on and off a scene then there may be an issue there of familiarity with C4 programming. I'm not a dealer, I'm a home owner, and I can think of several different ways you could do what you're interested in doing . . .

Since it sounds like you're at the pre-purchase stage, I'll recommend what I recommend to everyone and say, make sure you speak to some customers who've recently used your dealer and find out how happy they are with the programming and the experience.

All that said, yes, you can certainly do what you're looking to do. I've found over time that I tend to use variables for things much more than light scenes themselves. The one advantage for me of lighting scenes is that they can be directly selected from a MTS. Other than that, though, the flexibility and power of putting something in a variable almost always wins out for me.

In this case, depending on how you wanted to use it, you could either have the button toggle a variable ON and OFF, where if it changed to ON all three lights went ON and if it changed to OFF all three lights went OFF.

That would mean though that if the variable were OFF and a couple of lights had been turned on individually that you'd need to press the button twice to have them all go off.

If you wanted the button to be more responsive to the current states of the lights you could instead have the button increment a variable:

When BUTTON1 is pressed, VARIABLE1 + 1

Then, in the programming for VARIABLE1 you could say:

When VARIABLE1 changes,

If Light1 is OFF

If Light2 is OFF

If Light3 is OFF

Ramp Light1 to 100% over 2 seconds

Ramp Light2 to 100% over 2 seconds

Ramp Light3 to 100% over 2 seconds

STOP

Ramp Light1 to 0% over 2 seconds

Ramp Light2 to 0% over 2 seconds

Ramp Light3 to 0% over 2 seconds

The way this is written, if any of the lights is ON it turns them all off. If all of them are OFF, it turns them all ON. It could also be written such that if any are OFF it turns them all ON and if ALL of them are ON it turns them all OFF. Just depends on how you want it to work . . .

Hope that helps!

--Jason

[lippavisual]

The dealer probably told him that in programming, a lighting scene cannot be toggled physically, but with variables it can be accomplished.

[RyanE]

That's because Lighting scenes don't have an 'on' and 'off'. They're just a set of light values.

If you want two scenes, Scene 1 does what your Scene 1 'on' would do, and Scene 1a does what your Scene 1 'off' would do, then you can use a variable to track which scene you've triggered, and trigger the opposite one.

RyanE

[akg4y]

My dealer actually is quite knowledgable, so I figure he probably misunderstood me. I figure regardless of how well he sets things up Im the type of person that will be tinkering with the programming and tweaking things to my liking on virtually a daily basis anyhow...

Thanks for the help!