This may be a dumb question, but is there a way within Findvera.com to easily determine if a Scene is presently active? The dashboard shows all your scenes with “Go” buttons, but from what I can see, there’s nothing showing one or more scenes that are currently in effect.
Not a dumb question at all. I think we all would like to know when a scene is active.
However, is it well-defined what it means for a scene to be “active”? After all, a scene pretty much only has a single “beginning” (timer or event trigger), and anywhere from 0 to many “endings” (instantaneous command or notification, or many commands, etc.).
Could I suggest an alternative? Maybe a “Last Triggered:” or “Last Run:” (read-only) field within the scene’s pane?
This might achieve the same purpose you’re after, and still spare you from sifting through Vera’s LOGS to know whether a scene ran (or “completed”).
I know Slackner’s question (above) remains unanswered, but in hopes of pinning down some intermediate info, I set up a new Scene with #0 VERA: “A Scene is Active” [Door Unlocked], as the Event trigger. This scene was instructed to turn on a lamp.
Meanwhile, I made sure the actual “Door Unlocked” scene was ‘enabled’, had a trigger Event (Deadbolt > Unlocked) and contained at least one command. I clicked SAVE before testing this arrangement.
However, unlocking the Deadbolt did NOT result in the lamp turning On (though the command specified within the “Door Unlocked” scene DID get performed by Vera)!
Hmmm… is this another one of Vera’s “Ha ha, you misunderstood how it’s supposed to behave” features?
Now I REALLY want to hear the answer to Slackner’s question! :-/
I’d also like to tell when a scene is active, in addition I’d like to know how to “stop” a scene.
I set up a scene using the timer functionality to set temp at various times of the day. It works just fine.
I created another scene to just set the temp to a fixed value. It also works fine, however as the 1st scene is still active it just overides the setting next time the timer comes around.
So can I stop a scene? can I have one scene stop another?
And if I’m doing this all wrong I’d appreciate any advice.
Thanks…Paul
I will add my request to providing more information regarding the status of scenes…
tim
So while I would still love an easy way to know if a scene is active and/or a way to de-activate a scene within Vera, through the evolution of my Vera self-education and a lot of guidance from members of this forum, I have learned how to use virtual devices to flag status and incorporate into conditional LUUP code to control scene execution. It’s not the most elegant solution, especially for someone not wanting to get their hands dirty with some code, but it does work well. In this case, I use a virtual device flag to indicate whether or not my weekend home is currently occupied, and then use that to conditionally execute timer scenes, like an evening lighting scene. You can see more info at…
http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=2495.0
I then incorporate the setting of that flag into scenes I have setup for prior to my arrival as well as my departure scene (both of which do other things like shut off A/V equipment, change setpoints on my thermostat, etc.).
It all works very well and very reliably. I encourage you to give it a try, at least until MCV gives us something easier directly in the interface.
The one thing I definitely haven’t figured out is how to just turn off a scene altogether. Unless I’m missing something, once you fired a scene that contains a timer, you’re stuck with it until you change or delete it, as far as I can tell. It sure would be nice if MCV could give us a “STOP” button next to that “GO” button.
Well, a stop button should be good indeed. I’ve added a feature request for this: http://bugs.micasaverde.com/view.php?id=750
I’d love to see an “Active” and “Inactive” set of buttons that would function to control scenes as well as give me visual feedback as to the current state of the scene.
Last week was the first time I had left home for a long enough period to need to change my lighting and thermostat timers and I quickly became jealous of you programmer types who can set flags to change to an “Away” status. I can’t put in the time to program this kind of behavior in Vera, but dang! it’s a pain to go through every scene to change devices and actions, and then to come back home and change them back to what they were before.
CMRancho - for what it’s worth, I’m the furthest thing from a ‘programmer type’ and it was actually pretty darn easy to create a virtual device (i.e. flag) and then use that to control scenes and/or have my scenes set their status. Give it a try…don’t be scared 
Thanks for the encouragement. I’ll try that right after I figure out this new serial-USB cable for my Global Caché IR learner. 