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Creating Scenes in Home Center

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Creating Scenes in Home Center
24 Jun

A Guide to Scenes in Fibaro Home Center

So you’ve added your devices to Home Center and are ready to set up some automations, or scenes within Fibaro’s systems. Maybe you have some simple ideas, or maybe they’re a little obscure. Whatever the case, Home Center’s got you covered with 3 different scene creation tools, with difficulties ranging from beginner to advanced. There’s a way for everyone to create a scene in Home Center.

If you haven’t before set up a scene, I recommend starting with something simple, such as having a light turn ON when you walk in the room, and turn OFF when you leave. This is a useful and popular scene, and you can find out how to set it up in this step-by-step guide.

Tip: Before you begin creating scenes, ensure your devices have meaningful names so you can easily find them. It gets quite confusing if you don’t!
Now let’s take a look at each scene-creating tool in detail.

Magic Scene (Beginner)

Magic Scenes are the simplest method of setting up a scene within Home Center. They’re a great visual way for those new to automation to get acquainted with the scene creation process, and take advantage of the intuitive if-this-then-that (IFTTT) style approach. Just be aware that Magic Scenes only create simple automations with a single action, such as turning OFF a switch. Here’s a link to Fibaro’s guide on how to create a Magic Scene.

Watch the video
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Graphical Blocks (Intermediate)

Graphical Blocks are a clickable logic-block style scene creator that’s great for people with an understanding of automation logic and logical operations (boolean). Although it looks a little intimidating at first glance, with a little persistence it becomes quite simple and intuitive. This powerful scene creation option will enable you to bring 95% of your automation ideas to life.

Watch the video
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LUA code (Advanced)

LUA code uses a scripting/programming style approach for scene creation. You can think of LUA code as the language of your system. Learn the language, and you’ll gain complete, unrestricted control over how your scenes will work, meaning you can tackle the most complex scenes of all.

Tip: If you want to take your automating capabilities to the next level, it’s worth having a look at Fibaro’s getting started guide.

Home Center also has the option use the Graphical Blocks scene creator to generate a LUA scene, so you won’t need to write your LUA code from scratch. Simply click the ‘Switch scene edit mode to LUA based’ to preview the scene in LUA code.
Caution: Proceeding to convert your Graphical Blocks scene to LUA code is permanent, meaning your Graphical Blocks scene will be deleted/replaced with a LUA scene. To prevent loss of scenes, it's a good idea to create a copy of your scene, and convert the copy to LUA.

Watch the video
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In closing

Home Center offers 3 scene-creating tools of varying levels of complexity that can be used to bring your automation idea to life. If you’re completely new to automation, I suggest starting with the Magic Scenes method, as it will help you gain an understanding as to what can be achieved.

I also recommend challenging yourself to use the Graphical Blocks scene creator as it offers the perfect balance between effectiveness and complexity, and will meet 95% of your automation needs. A bonus feature is that it can be used to generate the bulk of LUA code for more complex automations.

If you have any tips or tricks you’d like to share, or if you have any questions, drop a comment below. It’s always great hearing from you!

Best of luck automating and scene-creating.

-Luke

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