Seeking Advice and how to upgrade an existing Piston

#1

1) Give a description of the problem
I have 8 lights in my sitting room. I have split them into 2 groups, internal 4 and the outside 4. This grouping is used to turn on and off the lights from movie mode, outside 4 dimmed to 10% and internal 4 turned off, to family lights with all 8 lights at 100%.

I’m using the attached piston to do this via ST Virtual Dimmer switches which are called via Alexa.

What I would like to do is add the ability to Dim the lights via Alexa ie Alexa Dim the Lights 50%. Whilst Alexa does as instructed and I see the Virtual Dimmer Switch dropped down 50% the lights stay the same.

2) What is the expected behavior?
Enhance the existing piston and add in the ability to Dim up or down the lights as requested.

3) What is happening/not happening?
Not much as I haven’t coded it, as I don’t know how to logically add this in. However what I do see is when I tell Alexa to Dim the lights 50% the Virtual Dimmer Switch will drop down 50% from where it was (noticed via the slider) however the lights themselves do not Dim.

4) Post a Green Snapshot of the pistonimage

WebCore%20Lights
WebCore Lights.png1178×2015 199 KB

5) Attach any logs (From ST IDE and by turning logging level to Full)
Logs from Live Logging when I move the VDS dimmer up or down.
Alexa

Any help on how to add in the extra functionality would be great.

Thanks

#2

Here is the method I employ to let a Simulated Dimmer switch act like a Master Dimmer.

temp

Whenever I change the level of the Master Dim (via Alexa etc), the other lights will adjust accordingly.

EDIT :
I recently learned that you want to make sure that you have no other triggers in the piston, or it may fire at inopportune times… (In other words, the piston I have above should be in a new piston, with only the one lightning bolt in the left margin)

#3

@WCmore wow can not believe its 8 days gone already, thank you very much for providing your method and information. Looking forward to putting my version together now.

Cheers.

#4

@WCMore Based on your piston i added in a new statement into my existing one and my lights are dimming based on my commands to Alexa. Your a star :slight_smile:

This is the logic I added in based on the guidance of @WCMore :slight_smile:
Dimming%20Lights

#5

Beautiful! Glad it worked out for you!

#6

@WCMore, no problem :+1: