Thank you for your kind words! I'm happy that the explanation was clear and helpful to you. If there's anything else you'd like me to cover, let me know!
I just started to get into home assistant and ordered some devices. I played around with automations and was overwhelmed by the choices. This video made just sit back and think: Wow...i can do SO MUCH STUFF NOW!!!! You explain very very well!
Wat een goede video. Je bent de enige op youtube die echte use cases deelt en ik ga dit in de keuken op onze beweging sensor toepassen. Momenteel schakelt hij na 45 seconden naar een ingestelde Hue scene. Wel schakelt de verlichting uit wanneer ik de tv op play zet, wat gewenst is om stroom te besparen. Ik heb met onze chromecast een bioscoop effect gemaakt. Play, pauze en uit.
I set my girlfriend's entry lights to turn red when the door is unlocked, and turn off when it's locked. Now it will work as intended. I've been in the HA game for just over a year now and haven't ventured into scenes, as I don't really use them, so have been dreading tackling this automation. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this simple solution!! First test at my house worked like a charm. I feel like a kid in a candy store again. :)
Als de garagepoort nog openstaat na zonsondergang wordt de lamp in de living rood. Ik was op zoek naar een oplossing om na het sluiten van de poort terug naar de 'previous state' van de lamp te gaan. Dank zij deze video is de oplossing nabij. Dank je Ed.
that was exactly what I was looking to do - thank you for the simple explanation. when looking into this before I was looking to create helpers with auto updating attributes, someone also mentioned python scripts, but this was far simpler. Thanks again 😀
I think I would struggle with HA a lot, if it wasn't for your videos. Well done. So easy to follow and your explanation is simple which helps novices like myself. Also, great music, very calming.
These videos are amazing. They are thoughtful and concise. For any beginners out there looking to get started, or intermediate users wanting to up their game, look no further. Thank you, Smart Home Junkie.
Finally. Tried to do this so many times and always failed. Guess it is my head not correctly wrapped around services and devices. Have it working now through this excellent video. Thank you and kind regards! (Subscribed 👌🏻)
Great I may re write my going to bed automation to a scene so can be recalled. Turn TV off /turn lights off in 20secs/turn on stairs lighting/turn off stairs lighting after 1min. Great vid as always plus feel like I've sat In a chilled health spa after listening to the back ground music haha
Very cool. I have automations that turn off the HVAC with windows / doors being left open but does not turn it back on. Now with your scenes video, I can do this. Thanks!
Very clear! I use just for quite long time your las scenario to change the frontlights to bright white when my garage door is open and restore the previous state when closed... Works like a charm!!!. But I've been stuck a few days trying to do (maybe in the wrong way) and scene that captures all the attributes of a group of lights excepts its state... If only scene.create support templates 😢
Thank you for the tutorial. I like it despite it is not giving a solution to my requirements. I will find a way to use scenes for all my devices. Having about 120 devices its a very dull work to secelect them in a drop down menu. I would like to find a way to just include all devices i have and save them as scene.
The scenes on the fly is awesome. I tried to do this so many times with smartthings and webcore, but capturing a device state never worked. Cant wait to get a few LEDs up and running and really have some fun with this.
Your videos are the most useful I found on youtube, allowing me to set up my HA in no time! Precise, no useless speech, only information. Thank you for that. But... as a guitarist (hobby) I cant help but look at all these awesome guitars in the background, omg! ... I can't find any link to your music pages... want to hear music from those guitars! haha Cheers from France
Saw the scenes on the fly in the HA documentation and thought I better find a video on it...and a great video I certainly found. I've started to transition some of my less complex NodeRed automations back to HA Automations as they are much more powerful now. Being able to identify which trigger started the automation is really nice.
I was confused at first... I saw no method to configure exact color/level I wanted... Then I realized whatever current setting is - is what's saved... Scenes is the layman easy mode.
Thanks Ed! Immediately I will use this to restore some of my Sylvania Osram bulbs as I haven’t used MQTT to perform updates so the default on condition light color needs to be restored on occasion. Seeing your use case and especially the steroid one was great! I will come back to this one in time.
Hey, thanks for the feedback! I'm really happy you found the tutorial useful. If there's anything else you'd like to see on the channel, just drop me a comment. Cheers!
Thank you Andrej. I did not use them a lot too, but when I was shooting this video I found out that they can be very powerful and I now wonder why I didn't use them before... They support all devices, not only lights and that opens up a whole new world for me!
@@SmartHomeJunkie my problem is that we don't have a single repeating setting and every light, every day or night is different :) I did create one for movies, but we used it 3-4 times in 2 years :D For heating we have that automatically with tado - as soon as window open is detected, it turns off, but that's internal functionality
Cool tutorial! I have used the scenes on the fly now for a while but ran into the problem then sometimes the snapshot scene is not recorded correctly. Especialy when you use delays for lights etc. I solved this by adding a small delay (say 500ms) between creating the snapshot scene and changing the scene. This gives HA enaugh time to save the state(s), allow lights to go to the desired settings.
I love your style! I've been automating since the late 90's but HA is fairly new to me. I'm enjoying the huge scope that it has to offer and with your help I'm getting there!
Thank you so much for this. I have never leveraged the scenes so far, maybe I should start considerig. Oh, and by the way, the geek in me is really curious to knowing what you have in the SERVER dashboard :D.
This is a great video. I am looking for more information on scene apply vs. activate. The documentation says that scene apply lets you apply a scene without first defining it. Does that mean I just define it in the automation and apply it there? What are the benefits of "reloading" a scene? I think a video on this would be great. Keep up the great content!
Now I have to back and look at a video you did on Mushroom Cards. I want to avoid Dwains Dashboard for now as I like making my own dashboards. What isn’t clear to me is if I needed mushroom cards for the scene switch. Might watch that part again as my use case is simple and it will get me started on my restore scene previously mentioned.
You can also use a standard button card for that I think. You do not really need mushroom cards, but they are really popular these days. Lewis from Everything Smart Home created a very good video on how to setup mushroom cards.
Great. I have been looking for a way to get my Google speakers to resume the music they were playing when interrupted by an announcement (e.g. "coffee is ready"). The only handicap is that it takes about 20 seconds after I set up the scene.turn_on command (in Node-RED) and the transition does not work.
Another great Video. 18 months ago zsarnett did a video of how to drag and drop lovelace cards. It has never been followed up or brought into core BUT I have been using it for the last few weeks and it is super stable and works really well. It might be an idea to let viewers know of this great feature! (Sometimes it does take a few attempts to get it right as it is still beta - but otherwise works ok)
Thank you for your tutorials, so easy to follow! I don't know if this is since the 2024.1 update but I cannot save the snapshot-scene created in the last part, the input--selector in the ui wont let me save something that does not exist yet. It just becomes blank 🤥
Mat, Check out Ed’s other videos! Especially fond of trigger IDs. Ed presentation of materials is excellent! Beware! Some of Ed’s cool stuff might tempt you to spend money!
@@SmartHomeJunkie as I sit here on my iPad editing scripts for my Tag reader to control playlists on Music Assistant on my DIY WiFi Arylic amplifier. Currently Wilson Pickett playing… yes I may have a problem 🤔🤔
I use Scenes in conjunction with automations a lot, instead of setting particular brightness or colour in the automation. It adds flexibility to use the same scene in multiple automations and if I need to change an entity for some reason, I only need to change it in the scene, not in every automation. When creating a snapshot scene, can you set a time limit, them delete the scene, or a condition that if the scene exists? If the window was open for 2 or 3 hours for example, I may not want the lights/heating restored to the previous state, but if it was less than an hour I want it restored.
Awesome tutorial! But i'm having difficulties. One of more random lights refuse to return to their prior state during the last step. I've put in delays and double sending the commands. Nothing seems to solve it.
@@SmartHomeJunkie Thanks for the hint. I will try to figure it out. Moving all my hue away from the Hue bridge and want to recreate the functionality i HA.
I jettisoned all my scenes due to the way Home Assistant records them ie. haphazardly. Sometimes it saves, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it overwrites the previously saved scene, other times it saves some states and not others. I got so irritated by this that I now run all my scenes as scripts. It may not be as quick or easily reviewable as creating a scene would be, but when you use a script to tell HA to do X, X gets done every time and that is a blessed thing indeed
I do not think that this behavior is due to scenes, but most likely because of your Zigbee network being flooded. It really depends on how you set up your Zigbee setup. Do you by any chance use Zigbee2MQTT with a Conbee stick?
@@SmartHomeJunkie I use an Ebony stick for the coordinator and a Texas Instruments CC2531 as a router. The Zigbee network is stable and responds quickly. I have Tuya RGBWW ceiling lamps throughout and three Tuya LED strip controllers, plus a few Yeelight bulbs and strips. The only thing I thought that might be the problem is an overloaded wifi, but it's a little difficult to tell for sure. The two TP-Link E4 mesh routers are supposed to be able to handle up to 100 connected devices simultaneously, but I'm noticing there's always a few stragglers listed in the offline devices list. At the time of this writing i have 37 devices that connect via wifi, 7 ethernet connected devices with three switches, plus a wifi6 router I'm using as an access point. I've had poor performance with scenes from the beginning when I didn't have so many connections so the overloaded wifi theory has few supporters in these parts. Sigh
@@matthewmalpeli Hmmmzzzz... What scenes actually do is just store the state and all the sttaributes and when you call a scene the state and attributes for all devices is being restored. So, in theory, the Scenes should work. It's always a difficult thing with networks getting flooded.
@@matthewmalpeli Your answer may well be the raspberry pi. As devices mount up as well as ethernet connected devices the pi may well struggle. I moved to a NUC for that reason and no issues at all since the move. Just a thought.
Nice, thanks to your input i have made the led strip at my sons room flash when it is diner time. Question: I have lights turn on at night based on camera motion detection, works great. But when it is dark and i turn off the lights, or the automation does, the camera switches IR and it triggers motion detected on the camera with light on as a result. Is there a way to stop this?
Maybe you can add a condition to your trigger that motion has to be detected for let’s say 2 seconds before the lights turn on? That might close the gap.
First off, thank you for your videos. I have a little problem I have come across when following your guide, here is my "Scene on Steroids". I have a Reolink doorbell, I have setup this scene so that if my doorbell detects motion from 21:00 until 07:00 if turns on a light in my porch, it also goes back to the previous state as per your video. The issue is that when it get's very dark and it detects some motion, the light comes on which is perfect, however when it goes off, the doorbell thinks its motion again and switches the light back on again and it then keeps looping. can I set something in home assistant to stop it looping? I have added a duration to the " Started Detecting Motion " and its not helping as i then need to keep moving on the porch for it to come on - Thank You
Are you happy with the evohome system? I have it too but the last couple of months it has become very slow to respond. So much it's becoming annoying. I"m considering changing systems but I have no idea to which one.
I thought I could solve a problem with this this I am looking a solution for. I want the music to continue on a google home when an anouncement is casted. But unfortunately home assistant doesn’t seem to pickup the right state of the media_player to continue with.
I guess I don't quite understand why you would need a scene. If you had an automation that was going to set your lights for evening like you said for the film or daytime why do you not just set the lights inside of the automation? Why would you call a scene rather than just say set light to this and set light to that? I hope that makes sense. I'm sorry I don't quite understand why you need scenes. They sure look cool, but I'm not quite sure why I would use those rather than just doing an automation.
Thank you for your comment! Scenes can be useful in situations where you want to create a specific ambiance or mood with your lights. They allow you to set multiple lights to different brightness levels and colors all at once, which can be more convenient than individually setting each light in an automation. It's all about personal preference and what works best for your specific needs!
I wish I could use scenes in HA, I have 2 children (5 yr and 1 yr) that run around the house plus my wife. Every time I want to set up a scene, they always run through the room, turning lights on/off or asking Google to change something. I just ended up using scripts to achieve the same effect.
The temporary scene ok, I can follow, but a normal scene. I see no use for it at all. I can group lights and do the same with one command in an automation just not only turning on the lights but also add the parameters for brightness, RGB and so on when switching it on. In my eyes HA scenes are absolutely useless as I can do it via a normal automation and as fast as with a scene. When I first read scene I thought it would be a group of parameters I define for my device and when I need it, I just tell HA to use these parameters on my device. That would really make sense. For example I want all my corridor lights to switch on with a special brightness, warmness or color depending of the time range the light is turned on. I don't want all lights to turn on with these parameters, no they should go on with these parameters when they are needed. So lets say I have 5 individual lights and I want to have 3 different kind of parameter set for these lights, Day, dawn/dusk and night. With scenes I now need to define 15 different scenes. just to accomplish this. That's bullshit. Then I can define three automations with if else clause to make that. It is the same, but far more easier to track. I'm sure with yaml or in Node-RED you can easily program it by using a set of parameters in a variable to accomplish this. Unfortunately I'm not firm enough in either of them to do it. Then if you want to add another light with these same settings you don't need to create another three scenes or if you think the parameters for night should be different I don't need to change x-scenes so everything is fine. I change it once at one place. That I would call a useful use of a scene. Just my humble opinion. I really like your videos and again you show how to use scenes in HA for everyone easy to understand. Don't get me wrong, but in this case scenes are useless in my eyes nevertheless (see above). A real touch to your scene on the fly would be reboot/power off survival. As you can write files (at least with Node-RED) the program I described would the real deal with your idea of saving and restoring all states. Perhaps I can learn Node-RED to do something like that, but at the moment I really struggle with my PC as the network stash crashes after a few hours of work and I need to reboot my computer. Additionally restructuring parts of my lights and so on, just doesn't give me enough time to learn. :( Today I wasted another 6hrs to find and resolve my problem. I found new article with people having the same problem, but nowhere a solution in sight. At the moment I feel as my whole fucking life runs through a tunnel at the moment which has a sign mounted at the end "Light at the end of the tunnel off because of maintenance until further notice." Keep on going, you make a good job. My problems just seem to be always special, so I suppose I'm the problem.
Well, scenes can be activated simply with a button. That can be done with automations as well, but that's a lot more difficult. Scenes are there to create a snapshot of the state of devices and save them as a scene which is also easier than creating an automation for that. I think scenes are underrated.
@@SmartHomeJunkie I can create an automation that reacts when a boolean helper changes status and create a button that toggles the state. I have replicated the function of a scene without creating something totally new. I still don't get it. What really is missing in HA and what really would be useful, is a definition that I can just use to set a device. So I could define a wanted color and you could set a light bulb to it. The same as you say "Alexa set xy to sunset." Then the light bulb or group xy changes color and brightness to a defined setting. Such settings would make many things much easier. You define a setting you want and you can use it on any device of the same type whenever you want.
@@SmartHomeJunkie Something I never realized until this video was the "Triggered by" condition. I had like 20 different automations, now I have less than 10, and my list Is more organized. :D Thank you for that!
Do you recommend any videos or have any advice for troubleshooting scenes? I'm having a weird issue where one scene in my office, just shuts off randomly. It may be on for 5 minutes or 5 hours and then just shuts off. I can't figure out if something is shutting it off in the background. This scene is usually manually turned on, but another scene that comes on at sunset will also just shut off on its own. Still trying to figure out the commonality, besides them being in my office.
Hi! The only thing that I can think of is to look at the logbook as soon as this happens to see if there's some automation that triggers this by accident.
I have a question to ask, how to achieve persistence in this snapshot? I want to long press the button to record the current light status and create a scene, and short press to activate the scene.
Issue: RGB lights won‘t save color when turned off (with solution) Problem: I tried to implement an Alarm, where RGB lights flash red triggered by a sensor and go back to their original state afterwards. If they are turned on it works perfectly well. The color is saved and they afterwards go back to that color. But if they are turned off the „scene on the fly“ just saves „OFF“… Afterwards they will be off again but when I turn them on the next time they are red instead of their previous color… Solution: I solved this issue with a workaround: 1. Create Scene on the Fly (Scene_A) 2. Turn the lights on 3. Create a second Scene (Scene_B) 4. Change the color of your lights. 5. When the Alarm/Sensor Situation is revoked first call Scene B to restore the original color and then call Scene A to restore all On/Off states. I hope this helps someone :)
Thanks for sharing your issue and solution! It's always helpful to hear from others who have encountered similar problems and found a workaround. I'm sure this will be useful to someone facing the same RGB lights issue.
Is there a way you could share this with me as in I’ve been trying to achieve this all day and I just can’t seem to make it work it. When I turn my light back on later on in the day or whenever I need it. It always is the “red” color instead of the color it was before PLEASE thank you
@@xJuNioRx2011 Of Course I can share my Automation with you. But I don't think that there is a way to save an automation and share it. The only way (as far as I know) is to share the YAML code. I hope you're familiar working with yaml because I think that you can't convert it back to the visual editor view after inserting the code. If you know another way to share it, let me know. Otherwise, please find my YAML below. In the "action" section you can see what happens if a window is opened. First I create the scene "beforewindowalarma". Then I turn my Lights on. Then I create the scene "beforewindowalarmb". Then I turn my lights red. In the "else" Section you can se what happens if my window is shut again. First I call "beforewindowalarmb" then "beforewindowalarma". I hope this helps. Here Comes the YAML: alias: Fensteralarm_Bad description: "" trigger: - type: opened platform: device device_id: 4dbd98ccfa11bc06e4123fca0e72a79c entity_id: 813be1cd0760cfd9897606ddd378c2a7 domain: binary_sensor id: fenster_offen for: hours: 0 minutes: 10 seconds: 0 - type: not_opened platform: device device_id: 4dbd98ccfa11bc06e4123fca0e72a79c entity_id: 813be1cd0760cfd9897606ddd378c2a7 domain: binary_sensor condition: [] action: - if: - condition: trigger id: - fenster_offen then: - service: scene.create data: scene_id: beforewindowalarma snapshot_entities: - light.sandra_licht - light.lampe_nachttisch_licht - switch.good_vibes_only_schalter - light.flur_licht_licht - service: light.turn_on target: device_id: - a13a40ce4b3f1ce415726e7c55ed0114 - ce8fe6c2b210b2d37a661a82075fdb95 - f4915f098a33d8bcbaa98a5cf0ac44bf data: {} - service: scene.create data: scene_id: beforewindowalarmb snapshot_entities: - switch.good_vibes_only_schalter - light.sandra_licht - light.flur_licht_licht - light.lampe_nachttisch_licht - service: light.turn_on data: rgb_color: - 255 - 0 - 0 brightness: 255 flash: long target: device_id: - ce8fe6c2b210b2d37a661a82075fdb95 - a13a40ce4b3f1ce415726e7c55ed0114 - f4915f098a33d8bcbaa98a5cf0ac44bf - type: turn_on device_id: 6b42fb1a241195dc0dc52d51d65b8651 entity_id: 782871bfa52009a7ec73bd4d8509da6a domain: switch - service: notify.notify data: message: Das Badfenster ist noch offen! title: Badfenster else: - service: scene.turn_on data: {} target: entity_id: scene.beforewindowalarmb - service: scene.turn_on data: {} target: entity_id: scene.beforewindowalarma mode: single
Hello, I had a question. On my dashboard I want to have preset scenes such as movie night, normal setup, ECT... I would like the automation to snapshot the state before any of those scenes are activated that way, say the movie scene was activated a reset button could be used to reset back to the original status, hence what your video explains. The problem is if say 2 scenes were activated one after the other the reset button would only go back to the previous scene I set before the next one. I would like the reset button to activate the snapshot of the original status of the lights before the first scene was activated in a certain timeframe say 15 minutes. Is this possible to do in the ui? I am new to yaml and don't know how to write this complicated automation. I don't know if you can help me with this but I thought I would ask. Thanks
Who decided, that you don't set the state of the different entities in the dashboard instead of within the scene-editor? Is he / she still in jail? 😵💫 This is imho the weak point of HA, some things are absolutely not logical. But thank you for guiding me through this mass! Off course, it's not your fault.
@@SmartHomeJunkie I know now, but I think that setting the states and entities shouldn‘t be seperated from choosing the devices. When I create an automation, I choose the Device and the states / entities. Why is it different in scenes? This way is totally unlogic for me.
Its not working for me. The lights that where on before the trigger will stay on after but keep the colors that where asigned after the trigger. So it seems that the scene.create is populated with the new colors although the new colors are assigned in the next lines ... very weird ...
@@SmartHomeJunkie when i run the part of the automation with the scene.create, it stores the colors like it should be. Only when the total automation is triggered, it goes wrong. It seems that the IF* part is not run from top to bottom but all lines together ...
Looks like exactly what I need. But I use IHC for controlling the lights and I can't see the devices in my HA - nothing mentioning IHC anywhere... Could anyone help with connecting the IHC entities as devices?
@@SmartHomeJunkie IHC Control is a controller based light control system. The output units are replacing normal switch and wire controlled outlets and it's all wireless controlled by IHC Controller
@@jesperdyhr6140 Interesting. Never heard of it before. You need to be able to store the state of each separate lightbulb to use scenes. Not sure if this is possible with your system.
This was EXACTLY what I needed! Now I can have a light in every room change colour when the bathroom door is closed, to indicate occupancy. Thank you!
You're welcome! Great idea by the way!
Perfect explanation, thanks. "Taught scenes / tot ziens!"
Thank you for your kind words! I'm happy that the explanation was clear and helpful to you. If there's anything else you'd like me to cover, let me know!
I just started to get into home assistant and ordered some devices. I played around with automations and was overwhelmed by the choices.
This video made just sit back and think: Wow...i can do SO MUCH STUFF NOW!!!!
You explain very very well!
Thank you for the compliments!
I'm 4 minutes into the video and already satisfied with the result.
Thank you for the wonderful explanation.
That is awesome to hear!
Amazing. You're my go-to each time I want to do something in home assistant that's a little more complicated. Please keep going with these.
Thanks!
Wat een goede video. Je bent de enige op youtube die echte use cases deelt en ik ga dit in de keuken op onze beweging sensor toepassen. Momenteel schakelt hij na 45 seconden naar een ingestelde Hue scene. Wel schakelt de verlichting uit wanneer ik de tv op play zet, wat gewenst is om stroom te besparen. Ik heb met onze chromecast een bioscoop effect gemaakt. Play, pauze en uit.
Thx!
scenes on the fly - just what I needed, thank you
I set my girlfriend's entry lights to turn red when the door is unlocked, and turn off when it's locked. Now it will work as intended. I've been in the HA game for just over a year now and haven't ventured into scenes, as I don't really use them, so have been dreading tackling this automation. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this simple solution!! First test at my house worked like a charm. I feel like a kid in a candy store again. :)
I just got HA a few days ago.. videos like this have me clapping as I almost indulged in a way harder process. my hands hurt. You're the best.
Thank you so much for your compliment! 🙏🏻
Als de garagepoort nog openstaat na zonsondergang wordt de lamp in de living rood. Ik was op zoek naar een oplossing om na het sluiten van de poort terug naar de 'previous state' van de lamp te gaan. Dank zij deze video is de oplossing nabij. Dank je Ed.
that was exactly what I was looking to do - thank you for the simple explanation. when looking into this before I was looking to create helpers with auto updating attributes, someone also mentioned python scripts, but this was far simpler. Thanks again 😀
I'm glad to hear that it helped!
I think I would struggle with HA a lot, if it wasn't for your videos. Well done. So easy to follow and your explanation is simple which helps novices like myself. Also, great music, very calming.
Glad you like them!
These videos are amazing. They are thoughtful and concise. For any beginners out there looking to get started, or intermediate users wanting to up their game, look no further. Thank you, Smart Home Junkie.
Thanks Ed, is very needed specially the on fly one ☝️🙏
Yeah, that one is really nice, isn't it? It's like a hidden gem in Home Assistant!
@@SmartHomeJunkie yes, I noticed is very powerful and I didn’t used before, so the all thanks to you 👌🏻
Today I learned more about scenes and entities than I did before. Thanks for the video. I feel empowered :-)
Finally. Tried to do this so many times and always failed.
Guess it is my head not correctly wrapped around services and devices.
Have it working now through this excellent video.
Thank you and kind regards!
(Subscribed 👌🏻)
Great I may re write my going to bed automation to a scene so can be recalled. Turn TV off /turn lights off in 20secs/turn on stairs lighting/turn off stairs lighting after 1min. Great vid as always plus feel like I've sat In a chilled health spa after listening to the back ground music haha
Thank you for this. Changing a scene is much easier than having to change an automation when you want to change the colors of your lights.
Very cool. I have automations that turn off the HVAC with windows / doors being left open but does not turn it back on. Now with your scenes video, I can do this. Thanks!
That’s great!!!
Very clear! I use just for quite long time your las scenario to change the frontlights to bright white when my garage door is open and restore the previous state when closed... Works like a charm!!!. But I've been stuck a few days trying to do (maybe in the wrong way) and scene that captures all the attributes of a group of lights excepts its state... If only scene.create support templates 😢
Thanks again for all your hard work and help simplifying this stuff for us mere mortals.
I was searching for this solution for many months! Thank you very much!
That is awesome to hear!
Thank you for the tutorial. I like it despite it is not giving a solution to my requirements. I will find a way to use scenes for all my devices. Having about 120 devices its a very dull work to secelect them in a drop down menu. I would like to find a way to just include all devices i have and save them as scene.
you are my hero !!!! searching so long for this solution with the snapshot.
Thanks so much! Scenes have been kicking my butt- I was over thinking it.
Great to hear that it's more clear to you now!
The scenes on the fly is awesome. I tried to do this so many times with smartthings and webcore, but capturing a device state never worked. Cant wait to get a few LEDs up and running and really have some fun with this.
Yes, it's an awesome feature that not many people know about.
Thank you so much! Very well explained 👍🏼👏🏼
You're welcome!
Your videos are the most useful I found on youtube, allowing me to set up my HA in no time! Precise, no useless speech, only information. Thank you for that.
But... as a guitarist (hobby) I cant help but look at all these awesome guitars in the background, omg! ... I can't find any link to your music pages... want to hear music from those guitars! haha
Cheers from France
Saw the scenes on the fly in the HA documentation and thought I better find a video on it...and a great video I certainly found.
I've started to transition some of my less complex NodeRed automations back to HA Automations as they are much more powerful now. Being able to identify which trigger started the automation is really nice.
I was confused at first... I saw no method to configure exact color/level I wanted...
Then I realized whatever current setting is - is what's saved...
Scenes is the layman easy mode.
Thanks Ed!
Immediately I will use this to restore some of my Sylvania Osram bulbs as I haven’t used MQTT to perform updates so the default on condition light color needs to be restored on occasion.
Seeing your use case and especially the steroid one was great!
I will come back to this one in time.
It also works great to restore your lights after your alarm is triggered and disarmed again!
I really enjoy how organized your tutorials are. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for the compliment!
Very useful tutorial! Dank u well!
Hey, thanks for the feedback! I'm really happy you found the tutorial useful. If there's anything else you'd like to see on the channel, just drop me a comment. Cheers!
Another great video. I always learn something new. I’d like to see a video on how turning on one device, turns on other devices.. or a scene.
That's not too difficult. Just create an automation and in the trigger act on a device if it's turned on.
Great video Ed! I really should start using scenes :D
Thank you Andrej. I did not use them a lot too, but when I was shooting this video I found out that they can be very powerful and I now wonder why I didn't use them before... They support all devices, not only lights and that opens up a whole new world for me!
@@SmartHomeJunkie my problem is that we don't have a single repeating setting and every light, every day or night is different :)
I did create one for movies, but we used it 3-4 times in 2 years :D
For heating we have that automatically with tado - as soon as window open is detected, it turns off, but that's internal functionality
Love your work mate. Greetings from Australia 🇦🇺
Thank you!
Perfect! This was what I was looking to do. Thank for your excellent tutorial videos!
You're welcome
Cool tutorial! I have used the scenes on the fly now for a while but ran into the problem then sometimes the snapshot scene is not recorded correctly. Especialy when you use delays for lights etc. I solved this by adding a small delay (say 500ms) between creating the snapshot scene and changing the scene. This gives HA enaugh time to save the state(s), allow lights to go to the desired settings.
That's a great addition. Thanks.
The scenes on steroids example is excellent.
It's great, isn't it!
I love your style! I've been automating since the late 90's but HA is fairly new to me. I'm enjoying the huge scope that it has to offer and with your help I'm getting there!
That's awesome to hear! Thanks for the compliments.
Hi, excellent and clear explanations, as usual !
Thank you so much for this. I have never leveraged the scenes so far, maybe I should start considerig.
Oh, and by the way, the geek in me is really curious to knowing what you have in the SERVER dashboard :D.
This is great thank you. Would love to know how to be able to activate HA Scenes in Alexa.
Thanks, the video was helpful.
awesome you helped me perfectly
Great to hear Twan!
Thanks for a great video. You really made understanding of scenes so easy. I really like that scene on steroids.
Yes, it's a hidden gem in Home Assistant!
This is a great video. I am looking for more information on scene apply vs. activate. The documentation says that scene apply lets you apply a scene without first defining it. Does that mean I just define it in the automation and apply it there? What are the benefits of "reloading" a scene? I think a video on this would be great. Keep up the great content!
very good videos!!!
Well, I guess I'm doing something right! Thanks for watching!
What’s the music at 10:55? Sounds amazing.
Really great tutorial!
what a resource you are. Thanks!
Glad it was helpful!
Now I have to back and look at a video you did on Mushroom Cards. I want to avoid Dwains Dashboard for now as I like making my own dashboards.
What isn’t clear to me is if I needed mushroom cards for the scene switch. Might watch that part again as my use case is simple and it will get me started on my restore scene previously mentioned.
You can also use a standard button card for that I think. You do not really need mushroom cards, but they are really popular these days. Lewis from Everything Smart Home created a very good video on how to setup mushroom cards.
Great Video! Thank you 😎
I'm glad you like it!
tysm
yw
thank you very much for the tutorial. : )
Thank you for the great content !!
You're welcome!
Great. I have been looking for a way to get my Google speakers to resume the music they were playing when interrupted by an announcement (e.g. "coffee is ready"). The only handicap is that it takes about 20 seconds after I set up the scene.turn_on command (in Node-RED) and the transition does not work.
Another great Video. 18 months ago zsarnett did a video of how to drag and drop lovelace cards. It has never been followed up or brought into core BUT I have been using it for the last few weeks and it is super stable and works really well. It might be an idea to let viewers know of this great feature! (Sometimes it does take a few attempts to get it right as it is still beta - but otherwise works ok)
I think I will wait until drag and drop will be implemented in the core version.
Thank you for your tutorials, so easy to follow!
I don't know if this is since the 2024.1 update but I cannot save the snapshot-scene created in the last part, the input--selector in the ui wont let me save something that does not exist yet. It just becomes blank 🤥
Geweldige Vid. Dank!!
OMG for one second I though the guy from Successions was going to help me with HA 😆
Oh, I don't know this series. Who are you referring to? Just curious.
@@SmartHomeJunkie I thought you looked like Fisher Stevens :) Thanks for the help btw
@@leseulsteve Oh wow, I never looked that way at him :)
Wonderful video good work keep it up
Thank you!
Great video
Thanks, Im new on your channel, an wow what a good information. Thanks 🙏
Thank you so much and welcome to my channel! Tell it to all your friends! :)
Mat,
Check out Ed’s other videos! Especially fond of trigger IDs.
Ed presentation of materials is excellent!
Beware! Some of Ed’s cool stuff might tempt you to spend money!
@@BELSERVICEMAN Yep, it's very addictive ;)
@@SmartHomeJunkie as I sit here on my iPad editing scripts for my Tag reader to control playlists on Music Assistant on my DIY WiFi Arylic amplifier. Currently Wilson Pickett playing… yes I may have a problem 🤔🤔
Очень хорошо объясняешь. Лайк!!!
Пожалуйста!
grate
Thx!
I use Scenes in conjunction with automations a lot, instead of setting particular brightness or colour in the automation. It adds flexibility to use the same scene in multiple automations and if I need to change an entity for some reason, I only need to change it in the scene, not in every automation. When creating a snapshot scene, can you set a time limit, them delete the scene, or a condition that if the scene exists? If the window was open for 2 or 3 hours for example, I may not want the lights/heating restored to the previous state, but if it was less than an hour I want it restored.
Nice Video again Ed.
What is you HA Setup? Is it running on a Raspi?
My production environment runs on the Blue. My test environment runs on a pi4 with SSD.
Awesome tutorial! But i'm having difficulties. One of more random lights refuse to return to their prior state during the last step. I've put in delays and double sending the commands. Nothing seems to solve it.
bonjour merci pour cette vidéo
comment je fait pour éteindre la scéne automatiquement dans l automatisation ?
Cool video. I could use something so i could cycle between etc 6 scenes with a press of a botton.
Totally doable using two automations, 6 scenes and a helper that stores the last activated scene.
@@SmartHomeJunkie Thanks for the hint. I will try to figure it out.
Moving all my hue away from the Hue bridge and want to recreate the functionality i HA.
@@GameOver556 It seems like a great topic for a video 🤔
very cool - I can turn my scene on via the dashboard, but when I press the scene button the scene does not turn off?
I jettisoned all my scenes due to the way Home Assistant records them ie. haphazardly. Sometimes it saves, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it overwrites the previously saved scene, other times it saves some states and not others. I got so irritated by this that I now run all my scenes as scripts.
It may not be as quick or easily reviewable as creating a scene would be, but when you use a script to tell HA to do X, X gets done every time and that is a blessed thing indeed
I do not think that this behavior is due to scenes, but most likely because of your Zigbee network being flooded. It really depends on how you set up your Zigbee setup. Do you by any chance use Zigbee2MQTT with a Conbee stick?
@@SmartHomeJunkie I use an Ebony stick for the coordinator and a Texas Instruments CC2531 as a router. The Zigbee network is stable and responds quickly. I have Tuya RGBWW ceiling lamps throughout and three Tuya LED strip controllers, plus a few Yeelight bulbs and strips. The only thing I thought that might be the problem is an overloaded wifi, but it's a little difficult to tell for sure. The two TP-Link E4 mesh routers are supposed to be able to handle up to 100 connected devices simultaneously, but I'm noticing there's always a few stragglers listed in the offline devices list. At the time of this writing i have 37 devices that connect via wifi, 7 ethernet connected devices with three switches, plus a wifi6 router I'm using as an access point.
I've had poor performance with scenes from the beginning when I didn't have so many connections so the overloaded wifi theory has few supporters in these parts. Sigh
@@SmartHomeJunkie My Home Assistant running on an SSD drive equipped raspberry pi 4 with 4Gb of Ram. So no bottleneck there either
@@matthewmalpeli Hmmmzzzz... What scenes actually do is just store the state and all the sttaributes and when you call a scene the state and attributes for all devices is being restored. So, in theory, the Scenes should work. It's always a difficult thing with networks getting flooded.
@@matthewmalpeli Your answer may well be the raspberry pi. As devices mount up as well as ethernet connected devices the pi may well struggle. I moved to a NUC for that reason and no issues at all since the move. Just a thought.
Nice, thanks to your input i have made the led strip at my sons room flash when it is diner time.
Question: I have lights turn on at night based on camera motion detection, works great. But when it is dark and i turn off the lights, or the automation does, the camera switches IR and it triggers motion detected on the camera with light on as a result. Is there a way to stop this?
Maybe you can add a condition to your trigger that motion has to be detected for let’s say 2 seconds before the lights turn on? That might close the gap.
I've made it this far 😊
First off, thank you for your videos. I have a little problem I have come across when following your guide, here is my "Scene on Steroids". I have a Reolink doorbell, I have setup this scene so that if my doorbell detects motion from 21:00 until 07:00 if turns on a light in my porch, it also goes back to the previous state as per your video. The issue is that when it get's very dark and it detects some motion, the light comes on which is perfect, however when it goes off, the doorbell thinks its motion again and switches the light back on again and it then keeps looping. can I set something in home assistant to stop it looping? I have added a duration to the " Started Detecting Motion " and its not helping as i then need to keep moving on the porch for it to come on - Thank You
Are you happy with the evohome system? I have it too but the last couple of months it has become very slow to respond. So much it's becoming annoying. I"m considering changing systems but I have no idea to which one.
Yes, I'm happy with it. It's always been slow which is logical so that it does not drain the batteries too much, but it's not an issue for me.
I thought I could solve a problem with this this I am looking a solution for.
I want the music to continue on a google home when an anouncement is casted.
But unfortunately home assistant doesn’t seem to pickup the right state of the media_player to continue with.
I guess I don't quite understand why you would need a scene. If you had an automation that was going to set your lights for evening like you said for the film or daytime why do you not just set the lights inside of the automation? Why would you call a scene rather than just say set light to this and set light to that? I hope that makes sense. I'm sorry I don't quite understand why you need scenes. They sure look cool, but I'm not quite sure why I would use those rather than just doing an automation.
Thank you for your comment! Scenes can be useful in situations where you want to create a specific ambiance or mood with your lights. They allow you to set multiple lights to different brightness levels and colors all at once, which can be more convenient than individually setting each light in an automation. It's all about personal preference and what works best for your specific needs!
I wish I could use scenes in HA, I have 2 children (5 yr and 1 yr) that run around the house plus my wife. Every time I want to set up a scene, they always run through the room, turning lights on/off or asking Google to change something. I just ended up using scripts to achieve the same effect.
The temporary scene ok, I can follow, but a normal scene. I see no use for it at all. I can group lights and do the same with one command in an automation just not only turning on the lights but also add the parameters for brightness, RGB and so on when switching it on.
In my eyes HA scenes are absolutely useless as I can do it via a normal automation and as fast as with a scene.
When I first read scene I thought it would be a group of parameters I define for my device and when I need it, I just tell HA to use these parameters on my device. That would really make sense.
For example I want all my corridor lights to switch on with a special brightness, warmness or color depending of the time range the light is turned on. I don't want all lights to turn on with these parameters, no they should go on with these parameters when they are needed. So lets say I have 5 individual lights and I want to have 3 different kind of parameter set for these lights, Day, dawn/dusk and night. With scenes I now need to define 15 different scenes. just to accomplish this. That's bullshit. Then I can define three automations with if else clause to make that. It is the same, but far more easier to track.
I'm sure with yaml or in Node-RED you can easily program it by using a set of parameters in a variable to accomplish this. Unfortunately I'm not firm enough in either of them to do it. Then if you want to add another light with these same settings you don't need to create another three scenes or if you think the parameters for night should be different I don't need to change x-scenes so everything is fine. I change it once at one place.
That I would call a useful use of a scene.
Just my humble opinion.
I really like your videos and again you show how to use scenes in HA for everyone easy to understand. Don't get me wrong, but in this case scenes are useless in my eyes nevertheless (see above). A real touch to your scene on the fly would be reboot/power off survival. As you can write files (at least with Node-RED) the program I described would the real deal with your idea of saving and restoring all states.
Perhaps I can learn Node-RED to do something like that, but at the moment I really struggle with my PC as the network stash crashes after a few hours of work and I need to reboot my computer. Additionally restructuring parts of my lights and so on, just doesn't give me enough time to learn. :(
Today I wasted another 6hrs to find and resolve my problem. I found new article with people having the same problem, but nowhere a solution in sight. At the moment I feel as my whole fucking life runs through a tunnel at the moment which has a sign mounted at the end "Light at the end of the tunnel off because of maintenance until further notice."
Keep on going, you make a good job. My problems just seem to be always special, so I suppose I'm the problem.
Well, scenes can be activated simply with a button. That can be done with automations as well, but that's a lot more difficult. Scenes are there to create a snapshot of the state of devices and save them as a scene which is also easier than creating an automation for that. I think scenes are underrated.
@@SmartHomeJunkie I can create an automation that reacts when a boolean helper changes status and create a button that toggles the state. I have replicated the function of a scene without creating something totally new.
I still don't get it. What really is missing in HA and what really would be useful, is a definition that I can just use to set a device. So I could define a wanted color and you could set a light bulb to it.
The same as you say "Alexa set xy to sunset." Then the light bulb or group xy changes color and brightness to a defined setting. Such settings would make many things much easier. You define a setting you want and you can use it on any device of the same type whenever you want.
@@captain_loeffel Yes you can, but then you need to create an extra boolean helper.
No entities on my scenes in 2022.8 docker version :/
Anyway thanks for the scenes on the fly tips! that's great!
Is advanced mode enabled on your account profile in HA? Might be that.
@@SmartHomeJunkie You are more than correct sir!! Now we're talking!
Thanks a lot!!
@@AlonsoVPR That's great to hear that you fixed it!
@@SmartHomeJunkie Something I never realized until this video was the "Triggered by" condition.
I had like 20 different automations, now I have less than 10, and my list Is more organized. :D
Thank you for that!
Do you recommend any videos or have any advice for troubleshooting scenes? I'm having a weird issue where one scene in my office, just shuts off randomly. It may be on for 5 minutes or 5 hours and then just shuts off. I can't figure out if something is shutting it off in the background. This scene is usually manually turned on, but another scene that comes on at sunset will also just shut off on its own. Still trying to figure out the commonality, besides them being in my office.
Hi! The only thing that I can think of is to look at the logbook as soon as this happens to see if there's some automation that triggers this by accident.
Can the 'Create a scene on the fly' be used with a toggle switch?
Yes!
I have a question to ask, how to achieve persistence in this snapshot? I want to long press the button to record the current light status and create a scene, and short press to activate the scene.
Issue: RGB lights won‘t save color when turned off (with solution)
Problem: I tried to implement an Alarm, where RGB lights flash red triggered by a sensor and go back to their original state afterwards. If they are turned on it works perfectly well. The color is saved and they afterwards go back to that color. But if they are turned off the „scene on the fly“ just saves „OFF“… Afterwards they will be off again but when I turn them on the next time they are red instead of their previous color…
Solution: I solved this issue with a workaround:
1. Create Scene on the Fly (Scene_A)
2. Turn the lights on
3. Create a second Scene (Scene_B)
4. Change the color of your lights.
5. When the Alarm/Sensor Situation is revoked first call Scene B to restore the original color and then call Scene A to restore all On/Off states. I hope this helps someone :)
Thanks for sharing your issue and solution! It's always helpful to hear from others who have encountered similar problems and found a workaround. I'm sure this will be useful to someone facing the same RGB lights issue.
Is there a way you could share this with me as in I’ve been trying to achieve this all day and I just can’t seem to make it work it. When I turn my light back on later on in the day or whenever I need it. It always is the “red” color instead of the color it was before PLEASE thank you
@@xJuNioRx2011 Of Course I can share my Automation with you. But I don't think that there is a way to save an automation and share it. The only way (as far as I know) is to share the YAML code. I hope you're familiar working with yaml because I think that you can't convert it back to the visual editor view after inserting the code. If you know another way to share it, let me know. Otherwise, please find my YAML below.
In the "action" section you can see what happens if a window is opened. First I create the scene "beforewindowalarma". Then I turn my Lights on. Then I create the scene "beforewindowalarmb". Then I turn my lights red. In the "else" Section you can se what happens if my window is shut again. First I call "beforewindowalarmb" then "beforewindowalarma". I hope this helps. Here Comes the YAML:
alias: Fensteralarm_Bad
description: ""
trigger:
- type: opened
platform: device
device_id: 4dbd98ccfa11bc06e4123fca0e72a79c
entity_id: 813be1cd0760cfd9897606ddd378c2a7
domain: binary_sensor
id: fenster_offen
for:
hours: 0
minutes: 10
seconds: 0
- type: not_opened
platform: device
device_id: 4dbd98ccfa11bc06e4123fca0e72a79c
entity_id: 813be1cd0760cfd9897606ddd378c2a7
domain: binary_sensor
condition: []
action:
- if:
- condition: trigger
id:
- fenster_offen
then:
- service: scene.create
data:
scene_id: beforewindowalarma
snapshot_entities:
- light.sandra_licht
- light.lampe_nachttisch_licht
- switch.good_vibes_only_schalter
- light.flur_licht_licht
- service: light.turn_on
target:
device_id:
- a13a40ce4b3f1ce415726e7c55ed0114
- ce8fe6c2b210b2d37a661a82075fdb95
- f4915f098a33d8bcbaa98a5cf0ac44bf
data: {}
- service: scene.create
data:
scene_id: beforewindowalarmb
snapshot_entities:
- switch.good_vibes_only_schalter
- light.sandra_licht
- light.flur_licht_licht
- light.lampe_nachttisch_licht
- service: light.turn_on
data:
rgb_color:
- 255
- 0
- 0
brightness: 255
flash: long
target:
device_id:
- ce8fe6c2b210b2d37a661a82075fdb95
- a13a40ce4b3f1ce415726e7c55ed0114
- f4915f098a33d8bcbaa98a5cf0ac44bf
- type: turn_on
device_id: 6b42fb1a241195dc0dc52d51d65b8651
entity_id: 782871bfa52009a7ec73bd4d8509da6a
domain: switch
- service: notify.notify
data:
message: Das Badfenster ist noch offen!
title: Badfenster
else:
- service: scene.turn_on
data: {}
target:
entity_id: scene.beforewindowalarmb
- service: scene.turn_on
data: {}
target:
entity_id: scene.beforewindowalarma
mode: single
Hello, I had a question. On my dashboard I want to have preset scenes such as movie night, normal setup, ECT... I would like the automation to snapshot the state before any of those scenes are activated that way, say the movie scene was activated a reset button could be used to reset back to the original status, hence what your video explains. The problem is if say 2 scenes were activated one after the other the reset button would only go back to the previous scene I set before the next one. I would like the reset button to activate the snapshot of the original status of the lights before the first scene was activated in a certain timeframe say 15 minutes. Is this possible to do in the ui? I am new to yaml and don't know how to write this complicated automation. I don't know if you can help me with this but I thought I would ask. Thanks
Is there any way so set my scene to turn on when i turn on my tv but only if it's dark outside? So not at a specific time, but for example after 7pm
Yes, create an automation with a condition that it must be after 7pm or that the sun is below the horizon.
Who decided, that you don't set the state of the different entities in the dashboard instead of within the scene-editor? Is he / she still in jail? 😵💫 This is imho the weak point of HA, some things are absolutely not logical.
But thank you for guiding me through this mass! Off course, it's not your fault.
Well, you can set the state of all the devices in your dashboard and then create a scene for those states. 🤷🏼
@@SmartHomeJunkie
I know now, but I think that setting the states and entities shouldn‘t be seperated from choosing the devices. When I create an automation, I choose the Device and the states / entities. Why is it different in scenes? This way is totally unlogic for me.
I'm really find it difficult to create scenes with my devices. Please can you guide me through?
I think I cannot do more than what I show in the video 🤷🏼
Its not working for me. The lights that where on before the trigger will stay on after but keep the colors that where asigned after the trigger. So it seems that the scene.create is populated with the new colors although the new colors are assigned in the next lines ... very weird ...
That's indeed weird. It should work, but I had the same behavior last week, so maybe there's a bug in HA at the moment.
@@SmartHomeJunkie when i run the part of the automation with the scene.create, it stores the colors like it should be. Only when the total automation is triggered, it goes wrong. It seems that the IF* part is not run from top to bottom but all lines together ...
@@SmartHomeJunkie Same issue when I tried this today
👍
Looks like exactly what I need. But I use IHC for controlling the lights and I can't see the devices in my HA - nothing mentioning IHC anywhere...
Could anyone help with connecting the IHC entities as devices?
What is IHC exactly?
@@SmartHomeJunkie IHC Control is a controller based light control system. The output units are replacing normal switch and wire controlled outlets and it's all wireless controlled by IHC Controller
@@jesperdyhr6140 Interesting. Never heard of it before. You need to be able to store the state of each separate lightbulb to use scenes. Not sure if this is possible with your system.
Zu Komplizert. Nicht für Anfänger.