Creating flows for scene controllers

I have created scenes like this for all rooms in the house:

  • Bright Light
  • Normal Light
  • Dimmed Light
  • Night Light
  • Good Morning Room
  • Good Night Room

Since these flows are part of nested flows for zones, they are all triggered by “This flow is started”.

For every room, I have multiple Heatit Z-push scene controllers:

https://www.heatit.com/z-wave/heatit-z-push-button-8/

Any smart ideas on how to keep the number of flows as low as possible when assigning the buttons on the scene controllers? Now, I end up with a crazy amount of flows:

10 rooms * 6 scenes/room * 3 scene controllers/room -> 180 flows for configuring the scene controllers

It takes a lot of time and becomes challenging to maintain…

The best way to solve it, might be a dedicated app for configuring scene controllers and mapping flows to every button on the scene controllers?

Unfortunately, you cannot add the push of a button on a scene controller as an OR statement. If Athom makes this possible, it will also simplify the configuration!

Can’t you make a flow when this flow is started, when room is…THEN turn on light, THEN start a flow, bright light.

And a second flow, when this flow is started, THEN scene bright?

That way you have only six flows for the scenes.

Thank you for your reply! I am not sure if I understood your suggestion right, but I still believe that I will need to have one flow for every button on every scene controllers in each room to get this to work. Which means 6 scenes/room * 3 scene controllers/room -> 18 flows for one single room.

Is it an idea to make a few flows what you want your bulbs to do? Like, if this flow is started, nothing in the AND part, Then bulb on, bright. Name this flow “ bulbs bright”

When you make te real flows, it can be like this, When button is pressed, AND room is: livingroom , THEN start a flow “ bulbs bright”

Another flow could be; When button is pressed, AND room is Bathroom, THEN start a flow “ bulbs bright”

This is actually how it is set up today. All scenes are defined, and then I have separate flows triggering the scenes with actions from the scene controllers. However, I still need one flow for every button on every scene controller with this approach, which then ends up with 18 flows per room just configure the scene controllers…

You can also try “omdhenken” / think different: is it bad to have many flows?!
My experience is that littong up in multiple flows makes them muxh easier to read+troubleshoot and less change on entanglements.

I do not like to have multiple flows programming the same scene.
But a single flow for every button, I like it :slight_smile:

I see your point, but having 180 flows in the app make it very difficult to navigate among the flows. And it becomes very hard to use for the rest of the family… Any other ideas on how configure all scene controllers and to minimize the number of flows?

Does anyone from the Homey team have a best practice to share on configuring a huge amount of scene controllers?

Anyone else who has some good ideas on how to solve this?

Sorry no idea on how to solve it, but in the app you should be able to create folders with subfolders. These can make your flows a lot more readable…

Maybe you have found a way but if you have not, here’s how I did it.
I use the advanced flow and in the logics I establish a counter. For the hall I make HallCount = 0,5.
If the counter is below 1, set the dim scene, and add 1 to the counter. I push the switch once more and the counter is more then 1, but less then 2. Because it’s above 1 it starts the next scene and adds 1. Next push is next scene and so on. I have 4 scenes and I reset the counter till 0,5 and start all over again. Working great for me :grin:

Can You send maybe a screenshot how you build it. i m trying something like what you describe but cant visualise it and im not that good with flows en advanced flows yet

Sure, I have taken this screen shot of my advanced flow. I made the variable “SoveC” and gave it a value of 0.5. Then I adds 1 for every time I press the button. I hope it can be for some help, and don’t hesitate to contact me again if ther’s anything about it you wonder. I’m glad if I can be of any help, and have to underline that I’m still a newbee myself.