Scenes

[david.delano]

I think I discovered something tonight......

The lights we on dim, and there was a fair amount of flickering, then they were stable for a while, then the flickering started again.

I think I narrowed down the time intervals when the flickering was the worst to when a wireless mic was on. Also, when I've been testing, the sound system has been off.

So, what frequency does Z-Wave use? I'll make sure my mics aren't stepping on the Z-Wave RF and vice versa. That could be the cause of 90% of the flickers.

David

[mikedr]

Z wave is 900 MHz

[david.delano]

My wireless mics are in the 648 MHz range, so that might just be coincidental. However, I also had the Z-Stick near the receivers, so I moved it away, and the flickering is a little better.

While doing x second polling doesn't appear to cause a flicker every x seconds, polling does appear to be an issue.

Here is what I have now.....I have an initial event that sets up the lights to a default state (not always 100%). I turn off the automatic polling. I then have events that create the scenes. In these events, I only change the circuits that need to be changed relevant to the previous scene. I had tried setting each circuit to it's same value, so scenes could be skipped, but even setting a circuit from ON to ON can cause it to flicker. I then have an event for off that shuts all the circuits off and turns the automatic polling back on.

Rather than dimming between levels for scenes, I set the switch dim rate to be around 10-20 seconds for dimming, depending on where they start, and I just turn off circuits for each scene, which should result in a nice smooth dimming to get to that scene. I have three house lights, though two are run together, choir lights, 4 spots, and 1 backlight. I can progressively turn these off to get the dimming effect desired. If I can ever find a smooth dimming script, I'll try it, but this is good to go for next week, when I really need to have this working.

I am still not sold on turning the polling back on, as now manual control will be subject to polling, and thus the possibility of flickering. So, I might just have an event that gets triggered every now and then to turn polling off. In general, no one will be looking at the status of the circuits in H3, etc. They can tell just by looking at the lights.

Oh, and I removed and readded the circuits that were giving warnings, and the warnings are now gone. I think that has helped reduce the flickering somewhat. A couple of circuits had to be removed and readded a couple times before they showed up correctly. Now, the information on all the switches is consistent. The only difference is that some switches have a different firmware level.

The lack of the common wire could be causing the flickering, or at least contributing to it. The lights draw so little power, that any change in voltage would cause a flicker. However, my guess is there are multiple contributing factors for the flicker, and that over time I might get them worked out. It seems, though, that any command send to a switch is at risk for a flicker. I think I've almost eliminated the steady state flickers.

David

[geeTee]

what is a scene? Any good links that teach me from start to finish?

[jmaddox]

what is a scene? Any good links that teach me from start to finish?

A scene is a collection of actions. Ie press button A, light 1, 2, 3 goes on set to value X, thermostat is set to Y. In HS they are relatively depreciated as the event system essentially does the same with the addition of including automation/triggers. If you use controllers such as the zwave cooper 5 button scene controller then you can still use scenes in the classic sense. You create the scene, then deploy it to the controller. When activated at the controller it sends the zwave commands independent of HS's zwave controller. This provides some fault tolerance since those scenes work even if HS or it's zwave controller are down. Scenes can be run from an HS event from the zwave Action option. Granted if you run them from an event you will just see "ENABLE Scene Manual (6) on device Inside back door foyer Button 5 - gate" That scene could be 1 action or 20. I would suggest it would be easier to just put those actions into the event directly; much more readable and easier to modify.

HS4 has a scene editor buried on the HS Zwave legacy page; you can create scenes here and then deploy them to your independent zwave controller. You can also build scenes from the the specific independent zwave controller's device's zwave page; if doing so you'll go to the settings heading then load the scene from the controller, modify it, then save and deploy.

You do not need to deploy a scene to a cooper 5 button controller as the button presses can activate HS events. I'm not aware of a single device that requires you to utilize a scene. Granted I use zwave devices. Perhaps x-10 folks still utilize them.

Bottom line; I do not recommend using zwave scenes; the HS event engine is much more flexible and powerful.

[Guest]

I have a Fibaro dimmer 2 module that is able to send scene ID numbers based on connected button presses like 3xclick og button hold. This is useful if I want to use the module input to activate other things then the connected light! This would be handy if I could figure out how to use the Scene output from the module to Homeseer. So far I'm also lost. I think I need to find something about using Central scene's. I anyone following this thread could offer a helping hand it would be appreciated!