Hue Scene Management Suggestions?

[dduff617]

I'm using Hue lights more in my lighting/automation system and could use some tips/suggestions.

Anyone have suggestions for a good way to create a "scene" comprised of Hue lights possibly along with other devices (such as Insteon and Z-wave) that would allow me to recall a particular brightness setting (and ideally also a color setting)? Ideally I'd like to be able to turn a scene on and off. Bonus if I can also dim/brighten the scene.

Hue provides multiple ways of grouping lights together, with rooms, zones, and scenes. Hue scenes for example are entered via the Hue app, but then they can be used in the Indigo plugin, which is nice.

Most other scene-like concepts I've experienced in Indigo (such as Insteon group/scenes and Indigo's virtual device groups) can be turned on (setting lights to a pre-configured level) and off (turning the same group of lights off). Hue scenes, on the other hand, afaik, can be turned on but can not be turned off. I thought perhaps that the way around this was to create an "off" scene to be used to turn everything off, but i discovered that Hue won't let me include a light in a scene with a level of 0% (off) - turning them off automatically excludes them from the scene. So the only way I could find to support a scene that could be turned on and off was to create both a Hue scene and a Hue group (zone) that contained the same devices. I'm wondering if I'm missing something?

Also I'm not sure I fully grok the idea of why Hue groups/zones appear as devices in Indigo (thus can be turned on, turned off, and dimmed) whereas scenes do not appear as devices, thus they can be turned on via the Recall Hue Scene action (but can neither be turned off nor dimmed). Seems a bit tedious to have to create both a scene and a group/room/zone to achieve what I thought would be a fairly routine need.

For a lot of real-world situations I have to deal with currently, I have only one or two Hue lights among some other device types, particularly Insteon Z-wave. Indigo provides "virtual devices>device group" which is handy. I tried adding Hue lights to Indigo virtual device groups, but when I tried to get the group to "remember" the saved states of Hue lights, it did not seem to work as a way to save the full Hue state (including color)...

I welcome any tips or suggestions you might have to share about how you control your Hue lighting scenes from Indigo.

[dduff617]

throwing another question on the pile:

i am experimenting with controlling hue lights by using a combination of a hue scene (to give me preset color/brightness for a set of devices that comprise a scene) and a hue group/zone made up of the same set of devices that participate in the scene (to allow me to perform a "turn off" of the scene). this is working pretty well. however, now i find that i can use a ramp rate when turning the lights off (passing the time in tenths of seconds to the "Set Brightness with Ramp Rate" action) and using the zone. however, i can not control ramp rate when turning on the scene using the "Recall Hue Scene" action.

so is there any way i can invoke a scene (turn lights on to preset levels) using a ramp rate?

i see like ramp rates are supported when using presets... should i try using those instead of scenes? in that case, it seems i'd be working with presets that don't exist in the Hue app... perhaps i can live with that.