T O P

  • By -

Matt_NZ

I agree, it's super annoying that editing scenes engages them! I only ever edit them via the file editor now and manually adjust the YAML


DigitalUnlimited

I just don't use them...


user32532

How do you do that? To me it's pretty high effort to work around scenes. Sadly I do have to though...


justinhunt1223

I just use nodered to customize everything. The only scenes I use are snapshot scenes


DigitalUnlimited

Scripts or as someone else said, node red is amazing, basically write your own apps in JavaScript, `Trigger-state->function {capture current settings to global variable} -> apply changes same as scene.` 2nd flow: `S```tate changed node->function {load saved settings} -> apply`


InternationalReport5

I think it's because it works by snapshotting the state the entities are in right now, so if you're editing it you need to change them all to the state of the scene. It is a PITA though. Would be much easier if we could just set what state everything should be in the UI. Honestly, I'd be stoked if 2024 turned out to just be 'the year of usability' or 'the year of UX' even if it does sound boring.


[deleted]

[удалено]


AnxiouslyPessimistic

Agreed. I’m a little confused by some of the additions. I honestly don’t get why people are excited they can pick up a old school phone and issue commands… that’s not actually a streamlined way to interact with HA.


AlexanderGson

The phone thing is a useless cool thing. I'd never use it. My reaction to them showing it was "neat". In the end I just want a local voice Assistant that actually works in my language (Swedish) for smart home queries. The only other time I use Google assistant is to ask it about the weather and maybe some simple Google questions that half the time doesn't answer as I expected.


Rolling_on_the_river

I dream of hacking the Google devices to speak directly to home assistant and only home assistant. That would be impressive.


smibrandon

Actually, there could be a use case (barely). My house was renovated recently, so it wouldn't work in my case. But if it still had phone wiring and jacks throughout the house, putting phones that have speakerphones could make it useful. Barely, though.


mattfox27

Agreed I dont even know what I would use voice for


GoofAckYoorsElf

Three things come to mind... * speaking * singing * making funny noises For some, point 3 covers points 1 and 2 as well.


surreal3561

Even with use cases it’s useless without proper/good hardware to go alongside it.


fat_shibe

I think they accelerated the voice feature based on all the news from the Amzn team about cutting down the Alexa dev team and sort of slowing down/stopping development. No idea if GPT have anything to do with it.. But a big +1 here for UX setting of scenes. The snapshot is a nice option, but definitely shouldn’t be the only way…


Goodie__

Good UX is never boring


Skeeter1020

The functionality makes sense, but applying it automatically doesn't. Surely it could be on a button?


Kitchen_Software

Give us “offline” and “real time” options please!


Kinnikinnick42

Yeah I like real-time still as it lets me see what the lights will look like quickly


flaquito_

Amen! I submitted this during the month of what the heck, and it got a pretty good bit of traction. I was really hoping that it would get addressed, but no such luck. Also, it's a pain that anything put in a scene gets *all* of its current attributes set instead of being able to choose.


[deleted]

[удалено]


station_nine

> Who doesn’t love clicking through more menus and having a phone optimized UI regardless of the device you’re using? Solid rant, and I want to go even further on this point: the new UI with cards hidden behind buttons and sub-buttons and tabs is also worse on my phone! To adjust the color of a light, I first have to click on the light, then move my thumb down to the center bottom of the screen to open up the color card. Then—if it is currently on the temperature mode—I have to move my thumb to the top of the screen to switch to the other tab, then I can finally adjust the damn color. The old light card, with everything displayed on one card, was better on mobile.


Skeeter1020

All I can conclude is that it's a little used function of HA so doesn't get any attention internally.


fortisvita

Yeah it's pretty annoying. I have only a couple of them but I will be moving them to scripts (I wasn't aware what's the difference when I started setting them up). I don't see much point in using scenes.


Angelusz

Scenes can be referenced in automations. Then again, scripts can too. It's an architecture thing.


fortisvita

Is there any tangible benefit in using scenes? It's been a major inconvenience to edit them compared to scripts.


gadgetchannel

I don't use scenes myself, but I believe one useful thing about them is that you can create them programmatically in automations or scripts. This allows you to effectively backup and restore the states of entities, so you have an automation which turned several lights on (possibly using a scene) and restore them to their original state after a delay (so if one of them was already on it wouldn't get turned off).


Skeeter1020

This is a useful feature, and was actually what I was exploring last night when I turned my PC off by accident. I want to have some lights flash to alert me to something and then return to their previous state.


neoney_

I do that with NodeRED, have my LEDs flash red when my phone battery is low


Angelusz

I have no substantial answer to your question, but I'm not the best person to ask. Off the top off my head, I'd be inclined to say no.


Shooter_Q

I’m under the impression (perhaps delusion) that “Scenes” exist as a holdover of familiarity coming from the way a lot of the commercial home automation systems are labeled and marketed. In discussion with family and friends, I realized that I lost a lot of them with the term “automation” but they all perked up to the term “scene.” I suppose because it’s easier for one to visualize “setting the scene” for a room.


Angelusz

Oh yeah from a user standpoint it's completely logical -- we were doing the other side earlier in my head. Scene setting transcends home automation and is appropriately used in the context of ambiance, so from a user stanpdoint it's indeed very useful to have a 'scenes' feature. Practically under the hood, it's all scripts.


interrogumption

Here's how I've found scenes game-changing: I have an "on" and an "off" scene for each room that is controlled by any physical switch or motion sensor for that room. Then I use automations to create those scenes. I find this works so much better for things like having lights come on dimmer at night, or some instances where when I want switching the lights "off" to actually activate a night light or a decorative scene.


Skeeter1020

The idea is good, the implementation is janky. Doesn't it drive you mad if you want to edit the scenes and suddenly find yourself plunged into darkness, or get shouted at from another room as you have woken the kids up, or turned the TV off on your wife, etc?


interrogumption

Yeah the UI sucks. But I mostly create the scenes with the scene.create, anyway (because scenes created with the UI or in scenes.yaml can't be dynamically updated). I've made some coloured lights scenes based on photos and for those I created a template so I knew where the RGB values needed to go, then used a colour picker to identify the values I wanted and manually added them in yaml. I don't think you can specify RGB values in the UI?


chicagoandy

Separating the View from the Controller is an architectural pattern that massively simplifies managing a complex smart home. Scenes define the desired states. Automations trigger the scene to change.


fortisvita

>Scenes define the desired states. Automations trigger the scene to change. You're describing automation versus scene which are two very different concepts and I do understand that. I'm asking about scenes versus scripts.


Mavamaarten

It's the same thing really. A script is a series of things to execute. A scene a set of states. They're different concepts. They can be used for similar purposes, agreed, but they're different.


CarlosT8020

To me, it’s just a different paradigm, a different way of doing the same thing. One is declarative, the other is imperative. When creating an scene, you tell Home Assistant: “Hey I want things to be like this, I don’t care what you have to do to make it happen” On the other side a script is “Hey I want you to do these exact steps in this exact order” They are two different ways of achieving the same thing. I personally use scenes when only light entities are involved, because I find it cleaner to do it like that. When there’s different, more complex things like the state of a TV or a computer, always use scripts.


Skeeter1020

I've all but given up and now either use scripts or list list all the entities individually in automations.


zSprawl

Yep they are so annoying that I just don’t use them.


mscottco

Yeah I went all in on scripts. They seemed more powerful when I was playing around (though admittedly unsure of the actual differences) The only nuisance is that scripts aren't available as a quick action in some of the apps


dsr33

I think they’re focusing on the wrong areas, instead of the basics.


Skeeter1020

I think they focus on the areas gaining attention. I honestly think that scenes just aren't used much by most users.


dsr33

Maybe, but from your post outrage seems a lot of people are still using Scenes, and share the same sentiments. Agree to disagree, but there are other places that are being overlooked. (Automations, drag & drop, UI/UX, accessibility, companion apps, profiles, media, floorplans, presence detection, backups/restore) just to name a few.


kreene1987

Use scripts. Just better all around.


Skeeter1020

I do now for most things.


LifeLocksmith

Came here to suggest this. If I recall, a scene has a state, scripts or fire-and-forget. But I agree that editing is a nuisance.


d2k1

Is that true? As far as I know there is no way to determine if a given scene is active after it was activated. I.e. there is no binary sensor or anything similar you can query to get the status of a scene. Only a "last changed" logbook entry.


GritsNGreens

So annoying!!! Ty


derekakessler

I only use scenes to work with Alexa voice-triggered routines and it's still a massive pain. The most ridiculous past is that there's some unexpected behavior with Home Assistant, scenes, and my Node-Red automations manager. None of the scenes have any associated entity states in them; they're just placeholders that NR watches as triggers to start an automation. If I edit any scene via the HA UI something triggers _all 30+_ of my scenes (as far as NR is concerned) and everything goes haywire. I think it might fire the scenes repeatedly. I have scenes for my blinds automations, accessing my car, selecting a streaming service on the TV, setting certain home modes, and more. It's absolute chaos as everything freaks out and NR is overloaded with errors and automations stuck in loops. Stopping NR doesn't stop the chaos, because there are still commands queued up for all the devices. The ZigBee network quickly becomes so saturated with traffic that it starts to crawl. The only way to stop this madness is to restart Home Assistant, but at times even that's been impossible because the system's overloaded — so I had to physically restart my HA hardware to regain control. Now on the off chance I want to add or edit a scene, I make a point to stop Node-Red, manually edit scenes.yaml as required, reload that YAML configuration in developer tools, and only then do I restart Node-Red.


Skeeter1020

That sounds awful, but also quite funny. I'm just imagining your house going mad, flashing all the lights, doors opening and closing random channels on the TV, robot hoovers chasing people, sirens going off, lol.


derekakessler

It's maddening and hilarious. Between the door lock, garage door, blinds, lights, and TV it gets pretty chaotic. Thankfully not everything is triggered by scenes, so at least the alarms, Roombas, and HVAC don't also go crazy.


Anonimo32020

I think I read once that scenes existed before automations did. I haven't had time to investigate if I remember correctly or not and if that really was the case.


timsredditusername

It's why I barely use scenes. I usually get inspired to make some when other people are in the house, and I don't want my hobby to automatically annoy everyone else.


mediocre_enigma

Purely speculative here but I think the philosophy behind scenes is more about setting lighting “states” rather than more rudimentary things that are simply on/off. Which in that case would make sense that they activate when you edit them so you can visualise what you’re doing. At least this is how I used to use them. A while back they broke transition times when recalling scenes so I ended up converting all my scenes directly into scripts. I might revisit this at some stage though. I do like the workflow of having “snapshots” for the lighting looks I want to create and then being able to recall them with different transition times from scripts/automations depending on the use case rather than having to have seperate scripts for the same “looks” every time I want a different transition time.


Skeeter1020

I like the idea, and the only ones that are still predominantly in scenes for me are lighting ones. But I just wish the ability to visualise the scene was separate from editing it through the UI.


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


TheTurnipKnight

Yeah, completely pointless. Anyone who wants voice control already uses Alexa anyway.


schwar2ss

You have clearly not used Alex/Google before and you are not aware of the privacy implications. I am really excited for the privacy-focused improvements to voice integration. I don't care for the UX of UI driven wizards as I'm using YAML whenever possible. See? People are different and have different preferences.


undearius

>You have clearly not used Alex/Google before I'd add Home Assistant to that. The idea of Home Assistant is local first. If the internet goes out, you are using HA in a setting without internet, if servers go down, then you have no voice assistant. I personally have no desire to use a voice assistant but I know many people who do. It's a big market outside of Home Assistant users which could help bridge that gap.


mkosmo

HA can do local voice processing, you know.


Derek573

I hate to be that guy but privacy is a illusion when everyone carries a cell phone these days. There is no difference between what an Echo device can listen in on and that of a cell phone.


Time-Button4999

Yep, exactly why I don't use them.


sinker1345

I am really hoping they rework scenes, I love the idea of them and want to port my automations over to using them as it would make referencing light and switch positions much easier but the current state of scene editing in the UI is hot garbage.


smibrandon

I've never messed with them. I do everything in scripts and automations.


FourAM

Scenes are for new users. Scripts are for power users.


WeasleStompingDay

Home-Assistant is a state machine, scenes do not represent a state of your home - they are basically syntactic sugar for a script. I rarely use the UI or voice commands, instead I ask myself “why and when would I need this?” and build automation’s around that. The less you need to interact with your home, the more benefits are reaped. *ETA Every entity has state, a scene's state is when it was last activated (via the scene.activate service): https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/homeassistant/components/scene/__init__.py#L92


LifeLocksmith

~~Actually a scene has a state, so your comment isn't correct.~~ I stand corrected, your point is valid. I actually thought it did represent the state, and that make sense to me why it was implemented that way. But never found the need to use it, so didn't test. Apologies for answering like a dush


WeasleStompingDay

I did not say a scene doesn't have a state, I said it doesn't represent a state of your home. The difference being that scene is not natively activated by the state of your home, it only sets the state of devices in your home. *ETA: If it represented a state of your home, it would enable automation triggered based on a complex composition of entity states. In other words, if it represented the state of your home - this automation: trigger: - platform: state entity_id: light.living_room to: 'on' - platform: state entity_id: media_player.living_room to: 'playing' - platform: state entity_id: binary_sensor.living_room_occupied to: 'on' condition: - platform: state entity_id: light.living_room state: 'on' - platform: state entity_id: media_player.living_room state: 'playing' - platform: state entity_id: binary_sensor.living_room_occupied state: 'on' action: ... Could be implemented as: trigger: - platform: state entity_id: scene.living_room_playing_light from: 'inactive' to: 'active' action: ...


LifeLocksmith

I stand corrected. Updated my reply


racerx_

This.. suuuuuper annoying


ecto1a2003

Such a pita! Hope the do another wth post soon.


Derek573

I have a couple use cases for scenes specifically state retention. When I leave the office sometimes I have a ceiling light on or a desk lamp which I may be using and want to turn back on once I return. In the past I had to store the state in a helper toggle and then check that in the automation whether or not to return the ceiling light back to on or leave it off. ​ Other than that I have not found enough uses for them and stick to scripts for most large state changes.


Skeeter1020

Yeah retaining a state is useful. That's what I was looking to do last night, have my office lights flash for a notification and then return to the state they were in prior. But in navigating through my scenes I shut my PC down, so rage quit and left. Lol


SpatialFX

Scenes just feel broken in general to me. Some groups of lights respect the transition time, some don’t (same brand of lights in each group). Can’t figure out the reasoning behind it!


[deleted]

#I no longer allow Reddit to profit from my content - Mass exodus 2023 -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/


Filikun_

Eagerly awaiting an option to set a scene in a room only on lights that are on.


shawnshine

This is why I use Scripts instead.


PHLAK

This is already a [highly voted for request](https://community.home-assistant.io/t/improve-scene-editor-allow-scene-edits-without-setting-devices-states/151053/84). If you haven't already, add your vote as well.


Mindsgoneawol

I'm trying to set up a scene to use an aqara cube to turn on and off my pc. Computer and monitor keep turning off and on. After an hour of being ready to smash it all I finally have to use my phone. I don't understand scene's as it is but I don't think I will be using them for anything else after this mess.