Smart Dimmer Plugin

[Colorado4Wheeler]

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"Single action to brighten and then dim your light"

This has two modes, default and "round robin". In default mode each execution of the action brightens the selected device up to 100% and then each execution will then dim it down to 0%. Basically you bounce between the ON state and OFF state through steps of brightness. A great single control for control pages!

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Introduction

Smart Dimmer is a simple plugin that allow you to use a single action to brighten and then dim a device.

I had a need to use a single button to dim AND brighten a device on my control pages. It is easy enough to say the button action would, say, "brighten by 25%" but once it hit 100% then I had to hit a different button to turn it off and if I wanted to go from 75% to 50% I had to turn off the device and then tap the button 2 times to get to 50%.

This has two modes, default and "round robin". In default mode each execution of the action brightens the selected device up to 100% and then each execution will then dim it down to 0%. Basically you bounce between the ON state and OFF state through steps of brightness.

In Round Robin mode you can choose to just always brighten, in which case you brighten to 100% and the next execution will turn off the device and the next will brighten again.

Configuration and Use

This is only a plugin so no devices are needed. Once installed you will use the plugin "Smart Dimmer" action instead of directly changing the brightness of your device. The action will prompt you for which dimmable device you want to control and the percentage you wish to brighten or dim it.

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Examples of Use

• Example: Dim and brighten device from a control page
  • Control Page: Create a button on the control page an instead of setting the action to dim an Indigo device as normal, instead use the EPS - Smart Dimmer and select the device you want to dim and click on the options button to specify the percentage and optionally use round robin. Now each tap of that button will result in brightening to 100% then dimming to 0 back and forth as much as you wish

[Different Computers]

Super cool!

This will let me remove control page popup UI elements that are pretty kludgy for the use I need. Thanks!

[jay (support)]

Approved! Thanks for another great contribution.

[Colorado4Wheeler]

Awesome ! Jay published it just a few minutes ago so it's ready for download. This was one of those plugins that I thought "not everyone needs this or wants it but those that do probably REALLY do" .

[durosity]

Very cool! I was just thinking the exact same as DC with the pop-up in control pages!


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[Londonmark]

+1

[jens]

Thanks, working great!!

[Colorado4Wheeler]

A lot of folks may not have seen this get posted so I'm replying to bump it in the forums so you know it's out there .

[FlyingDiver]

I just spent a good 30 minutes banging my head wondering why Smart Dimmer wasn't actually doing anything to the lights I was trying control. Finally figured out that the Lutron RRA2 plugin doesn't implement the DimBy and BrightenBy actions. D'oh. There's my coding project for tomorrow. I've got some other updates for that plugin to do anyway.

[Colorado4Wheeler]

Haha, I've been down that road myself . Good thing you write plugins, I'm betting you dove into my code thinking "what did he screw up here?"

[FlyingDiver]

Haha, I've been down that road myself . Good thing you write plugins, I'm betting you dove into my code thinking "what did he screw up here?"

Well, I did add debug statements to make sure it was actually doing something, then I looked at what actions it was calling and finally figured out that I didn't recall seeing those in the Lutron plugin.

[Colorado4Wheeler]

Well, I did add debug statements

I'm working on that. My new plugins are using my "universal" library that does a lot more debugging, but that one was so quick that I didn't put a lot of effort into having a debug system. Added to my update list .

[Londonmark]

Awesome plugin that I have finally got round to trying. Only one request: would it be possible to choose the direction (for the Round Robin)? Right now it brightens with each press, but it would be great to dim with each press.

[Colorado4Wheeler]

It does both automatically, so it will brighten to 100% then dim to 0% and it knows if it's at 100% or not. The only possible change would be to have a "default" so if you were at 75% it would go down instead of up.

[Londonmark]

That could be useful...

The one other issue I have is that the dimming of some of my lights is not especially linear - so for example, the best sequence for one set of lights if brightness levels of 1, 3, 5, 10, 25, 50 100. I use a simple script to deal with that.