[dss-developer] Scenes 11 & 12 (decrement-increment)

[Jean-Marc Trinon]

Hi Christoph,

> It doesn't make sense to present these scenes to the user because a single step is too "small" that someone couldn't do useful things with that.

From what I experimented by calling the scene through JSON, just calling it once made the lights visibly brighter or dimmer.
And I used a mix of lights (lights from the development kit + some hue lights).
Is the delta for increment/decrement part of the device configuration? Is there a recommendation regarding what the default
value for the delta should be?

Why not show these scenes in the context of defining user defined actions at least. One can easily imagine setting a
user defined action that calls "increment" two or three times to achieve the desired effect, if one time is not
enough.

Like this, it would require to explicitly define such an action for it to become available in the event responder.
The user defined action would be used to calibrate the response in fact.


> More useful would be to have  a command to set the output value to a defined value.

Or even have a command where the output can be ramped up or down by some percentage
of what the current value is.


> But since dS relies on room states and so on it is not a really good idea to control just a single device. Please set a scene to the desired value and call this scene. Or, if you want to have a button to dim a device, just use a normal push-button and set it to a dS colour.
> 
> Or, better: Please describe exactly, what you intend to do.



While the scene defines the brightness and colour of the different light points, very often customers have
been asking for a simple way to adjust up or down the overall brightness of the lights currently being on
in the room.
If I have three scenes and I want to have slight variations of brightness 2 steps up and 2 steps down, I quickly
end up with too many scenes and it becomes cumbersome. 

Through the various installation I have designed (using other systems than DigitalStrom so far), 50% of the customers really
don't like the one button only to control brightness. Typically these customers also don't like the one single button to control
opening/closing a garage door or a shade in fact.

The main reason for dislike is that 50% of the time it starts going in the wrong direction. And if it goes down while in fact you want to
go up, you either have to stop pressing and press again or wait to reach bottom so it cycles going up. Usually, after
calibration of stepping functions, customers know they want to nudge one or two steps up or down. So it's very simple to press once or twice
the + or - buttons and they know exactly what to expect. After they experimented with +/-, those customers never wanted to
go back to a single button kept pressed to control brightness.

I personally don't care what the customer prefers, I just make it the way they want.

So, for those customers, I ended up using explicit +/- buttons that do control the dimming of the whole
scene in the room. + steps up and - steps down by some percentage typically. The idea is to keep
the same kind of light mix but give some more or some less brightness.

Does this makes sense?

This is so far the only blocking point I encountered in my evaluation of DigitalStrom.

And while I'm on it, one enhancement that would be really be awesome, would be to enable editing actual
javascript code as the implementation for a user defined action. The idea being that the code would be executed 
on the dssserver when the action is triggered. Obviously reserved for advanced users :-)

jmt