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Devices => Engen -- Home Automation with Z-Wave => Topic started by: jsmith967 on June 28, 2018, 07:26:05 am

Title: Engen and Lighting Explanation Please!
Post by: jsmith967 on June 28, 2018, 07:26:05 am
Hello,

I am trying to understand Engen. I've read all the introduction material and realize with the right Z-wave equipment, Engen can control lights through Panel. However, can Engen do this with the appropriate Z-wave equipment?

- Push Play within JRiver Theater View under a certain category (say "Trailers") and dim the lights to 50%
- Push Play under category "Movies" Turn off lights completely
- Push Pause while watching movie and brings lights back up to 20%

I realize this is the engagement of scenes but I couldn't tell whether Engen will allow scenes to be activated by Play, Pause buttons and within other categories. I realize Engen allows scenes to be manually engaged but can it do it automatically given scenarios like above?

Thanks!
Title: Re: Engen and Lighting Explanation Please!
Post by: JimH on June 28, 2018, 09:16:49 am
I don't think that's possible (mixing MC and Engen commands).  I may be wrong.

Sets of lights and their levels can be assigned to scenes, as you know.  These can be assigned to hardware remote controls.  The Aeon minimote, for example.  So it's pretty simple to set the lights to dim with a button and then off with another.

Playpower might be useful.
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/PlayPower
Title: Re: Engen and Lighting Explanation Please!
Post by: BradATIMA on June 28, 2018, 09:33:51 am
I think that this could be done to a certain degree using PlayPower. With PlayPower and Engen you can execute Engen commands, like activating a scene, with the play button in Media Center, but not the pause button. For now, PlayPower only affects the play button. You can also create different PlayPower commands for different zones. So, you could create a 'Trailers' zone and a 'Movies' zone that both play to the same device but have different PlayPower commands. You might be able to automate this further with zone switch rules so trailers always play to the 'Trailers' zone and movies always play to the 'Movies' zone. I haven't tried combining zone switching to know how well this works, yet.
Title: Re: Engen and Lighting Explanation Please!
Post by: jsmith967 on June 29, 2018, 09:58:32 am
Great, I'll read up on PlayPower. Seems like the possibility is there but there must be some modification of code to get it to be seamless.

Apart from Engen, do you all know how to achieve what I'm looking for?