Right now most of my automations are around controlling all of the Hue lights in my house (I have well over 50) and trying to mimic the Natural Light scene in the Hue app. There is probably an easier way, but I’m curious if my mess of a spaghetti flow is going to end up slowing down performance because of all of the if/then paths it can take.
Below is an example of a flow I have to activate certain scenes if the lights are turned on throughout the day. It’s basically saying “If the time is X and Y light is already on, then activate this part of the Natural Light Hue scene”
Is there an easier way to do this? I saw that Moods was recently added but I still don’t know if that will be any better. Maybe leverage Groups and group lights together? Curious what you all think.
Looks very neat to me!
You could drag the “the time is” cards to the middle point of the following cards. Then it becomes more spider like instead of spaghetti like
There’s many ways to reduce the number of flow cards, but it depends on how many things are to command, or as condition, in a group, or not.
I would for visibility also pull the two “is on” or “is off” (“when” cards) to the front, indicating those are also triggers, i.e. all triggers are on the first row, the “and” and “then” cards follow in the rest of the colomns. At least that helps me in visibility. Further for neatness I agree with Peter.
Though to be honest, it already looks nicely spaced and structured
Do You have a Hue bridge I think You should be able to just do the settings there. That is turn on the light and Your settings in HUE should be valid. You have the option with every light, translated from Swedish, “latest used” or “adapted”.
So when the lights go on it is always in, as I use, the latest used. By default I think Hue uses “Standard” - full power and warmwhite if You don´t do these settings.
Edit: I now see that You have different settings for diffent times so my suggetstion isn´t valid sorry.
In my flows I try to avoid crossing lines. So I use the ‘spider’-solution Peter suggested. I think it’s easier to see that the ‘basement’ is skipped. My lines never run behind cards.
I arrange all the cards so that all the lines run from left to right and as horizontal as possible. Notice the spacing between the AND-cards en between the THEN-cards.
To avoid lines going from right to left I used the ALL-card.
The difference between ‘is on’ and ‘is off’ can easily be overlooked. So I only used ‘is on’-cards The yellow lines makes it more clearly the ‘plafond2’ and ‘plafond3’ should be off.
(To make this flow I used one light and one scene.)
(Before advanced flow I had 5 or 6 flows to manage one group of lights. So when I noticed unwanted behavior I had to check multiple flows. So I decided to have all triggers (time, movement , lux-level, going away/coming home, awake/asleep) and conditions concerning these lights in one canvas. So the flow for my outdoorlights looks this:
This is one of my flows closest to the ‘spaghetti zone’.
It operates the kitchen lights, depending on the time of day, position of the sun, and outdoor lux values.
I decided to use some action cards more than once, in favor of less crossing lines.
My goal is to keep the trigger, condition, action and log cards aligned into their own ‘column’.
I also ‘misuse’ the ANY block to force lines the way I like.
I never use the ALL block, to me it is a potential spaghetti increaser, and it makes flows less readable to me.
