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HA is fantastic once you’re past the learning curve but is still aggressively unintuitive sometimes, and I find little irritants all the time. Why can’t you make the Settings pages and sub-pages top level menu items? Why are entities and devices buried so deep in Settings? Why can’t you edit Zones from the Map view? Why can’t you easily rename entities in bulk on a per-device basis? Why can’t you automatically replace entity references in Automations with an updated entity name? Why isn’t there good documentation overall about how the system works instead of just technical documentation with narrow focuses? Why is the discord full of Linux elitist types who expect you to know the system when you’re trying to learn it?
It’s the little things everywhere that make me long for a Valve Software level of polish. There has been progress like the push to not manually configure things with YAML, but it’s so slow.
Dimming is just light.room: turn on > XX% so it makes sense that it would turn on all lights assigned to that specific entity. I use Adaptive Brightness so that I don’t have to fiddle with dimming lights manually. The sun does that for me.
I know how it works, I’m just saying it’s unintuitive. It’s not how any other smart home system works.
I use adaptive brightness too, actually. But nearly every time I’m manually adjusting a room’s existing brightness, I don’t want every single unpowered devices to turn on, too.
99% of the time I want to adjust the current lighting, I don’t want to first turn on all lights and then adjust all of those lights to a uniform standard before individually toggling them all individually. Powering on all unpowered lights when adjusting brightness should be the edge case, IMO (also again not just my opinion, but the industry standard)
For the record all other smart home systems treat room groups the way I am describing (like a dimmer knob and power switches). But there isn’t even an option in HA for rooms to “only adjust devices currently in use”. The smart home companies seem to have researched how people naturally intuit such things.
If you’re adjusting the same lights repeatedly, you could set them up as a group.
It’s more work, but you could also write a script that detects the current status of each light then sets the brightness if it’s on. I use something like that for our smart porch lights that are on a smart switch - if the switch is off, turn it on, wait a bit for the lights to get on the network, then set them to the right color or whatever. (The switch normally stays on, but it gets turned off occasionally and it doesn’t automatically turn on after a power outage.)
I haven’t used other automation systems - I avoided them because I didn’t want to get locked into one, until I found HA. I also have never thought to “dim a room” - actually I’ve never used entire room controls at all, they never made a lot of sense to me, but then I generally only have one or two lights in a room to control.
HA is fantastic once you’re past the learning curve but is still aggressively unintuitive sometimes, and I find little irritants all the time. Why can’t you make the Settings pages and sub-pages top level menu items? Why are entities and devices buried so deep in Settings? Why can’t you edit Zones from the Map view? Why can’t you easily rename entities in bulk on a per-device basis? Why can’t you automatically replace entity references in Automations with an updated entity name? Why isn’t there good documentation overall about how the system works instead of just technical documentation with narrow focuses? Why is the discord full of Linux elitist types who expect you to know the system when you’re trying to learn it?
It’s the little things everywhere that make me long for a Valve Software level of polish. There has been progress like the push to not manually configure things with YAML, but it’s so slow.
The fact that dimming a room turns ON all the lights in the room is actually wild
Dimming is just light.room: turn on > XX% so it makes sense that it would turn on all lights assigned to that specific entity. I use Adaptive Brightness so that I don’t have to fiddle with dimming lights manually. The sun does that for me.
I know how it works, I’m just saying it’s unintuitive. It’s not how any other smart home system works.
I use adaptive brightness too, actually. But nearly every time I’m manually adjusting a room’s existing brightness, I don’t want every single unpowered devices to turn on, too.
You could create a separate light group for the ones you typically do have on at those times and just use that when you want to dim the room lights
What would you expect it to do? I would think you’re telling it to set all lights to whatever level…
I would expect it to behave like all other smart home systems, or like a physical dimmer switch/power switch.
Dim the lights that are already on, and ignore the ones that are off?
I’m just pointing out here that you and I have different expectations; how could the software know what you intended?
99% of the time I want to adjust the current lighting, I don’t want to first turn on all lights and then adjust all of those lights to a uniform standard before individually toggling them all individually. Powering on all unpowered lights when adjusting brightness should be the edge case, IMO (also again not just my opinion, but the industry standard)
For the record all other smart home systems treat room groups the way I am describing (like a dimmer knob and power switches). But there isn’t even an option in HA for rooms to “only adjust devices currently in use”. The smart home companies seem to have researched how people naturally intuit such things.
If you’re adjusting the same lights repeatedly, you could set them up as a group.
It’s more work, but you could also write a script that detects the current status of each light then sets the brightness if it’s on. I use something like that for our smart porch lights that are on a smart switch - if the switch is off, turn it on, wait a bit for the lights to get on the network, then set them to the right color or whatever. (The switch normally stays on, but it gets turned off occasionally and it doesn’t automatically turn on after a power outage.)
I haven’t used other automation systems - I avoided them because I didn’t want to get locked into one, until I found HA. I also have never thought to “dim a room” - actually I’ve never used entire room controls at all, they never made a lot of sense to me, but then I generally only have one or two lights in a room to control.
The conversation topic was unintuitive aspects of HA, I’m aware hacky workarounds exist, but I find this (pretty central) behavior quite clunky.
I also find it crazy that you’ve never wanted to dim or brighten more than one light at a time lol but then again, diversity is the spice of FOSS!