Scene short comings

[petehug]

Use case:

Our bowling club has 9 bowling green sprinklers, one in each corner, one in the middle of each side and one in the center.

Water pressure is too low to run more than one sprinkler at a time.

Sprinklers are configured to activate at 7pm, one at a time. We have 3 settings: long, medium and short.

The short setting runs each of the corners for 1 minute, then each side for 2 minutes and lastly the center for 4 minutes.

The medium setting should invoke the short setting 3 times in succession.

The long setting should invoke the shot setting 6 times in succession.

We have 3 Sonoff (4 channel) devices. There is also a main valve which must be open for any of the sprinklers to work but should be off when no sprinkler is active.

There are 3 people who should be able to override whatever is happening. Each of them have their own eWeLink app login.

I’m the technician who does the system setup, but I’m not the one who decides when and what needs to be done.

For example, a user might decide to run specific sprinklers manually (high wind) or to disable the system completely (wet days) or schedule an additional cycle in the early morning hours (super dry), etc.

So here is what I’ve done.

I created these scenes in a home called Bowling Club which I shared with the 3 users:

1. Manual Short as described above
2. Manual Medium should really invoke Manual Short 3 times but eWeLink won’t let me so I set the delays to 3, 6 and 12.
3. Manual Long should really invoke Manual Short 6 times but eWeLink won’t let me so I set the delays to 6, 12 and 24.
4. Manual OFF turns OFF all active switches from the 3 Sonoff devices
5. Auto Short which triggers Manual Short at 7pm
6. Auto Medium which triggers 3 Manual Short at 7pm (this does a better job than Manual Medium)
7. Auto Long which triggers 6 Manual Short at 7pm (this does a better job than Manual Long)
8. Manual Auto Short Enable which disables Auto Medium and Auto Long and enables Auto Short
9. Manual Auto Medium Enable which disables Auto Short and Auto Long and enables Auto Medium
10. Manual Auto Long Enable which disables Auto Short and Auto Medium and enables Auto Long
11. Auto OFF which disables Auto Short, Auto Medium and Auto Long

All scenes have “Show in current home” on. I gave the OFF scenes red icons and the others green icons.

I labelled the 10 Sonoff switches in use MV, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. I made sure all these switches are shown on the home screen in the above order. The 2 unused switches are labelled N/A and appear last.

Problems with eWeLink:

• Unused entities clutter screens: why can’t I disable an unused switch so that it only shows when I look at the device’s properties where I see the switch as disabled and I can re-enable it if need be?

• Device grouping is not intuitive: manual Short has 39 actions!!! When I activate a sprinkler, I set all the 10 switches in use correctly in each step so that the system corrects itself in case a user “fat-fingered” a switch on the home screen, i.e. one action for each device of four switches to set MV and the correct sprinkler to ON and all other used switches to OFF, a DELAY action and another 3 actions to turn all switches OFF when done. I tried grouping the three Sonoff devices expecting to see 12 switches, but I see only 4.

• Nested scenes: unlike Auto Scenes, manual scenes can’t call other manual scenes. Why not? So instead of implementing 2 and 3 above like 6 and 7, I had to duplicate 1 above twice and it doesn’t even work like 6 and 7 (which is what I really wanted, but to implement this precisely, it would have resulted in 111 or 219 Actions respectively ).

• Invisibility of running scenes: while users can see which sprinkler is ON, they can’t they see if a scene is running or not.
  It isn’t obvious what is happening if I run a manual scene and then, while it is still running, tap it again (or another user taps it), though I think it just restarts.
  I’m sure 2 or more manual scenes can run concurrently and thus interfere with each other.
  Really cool would be if a scene icon would look disabled while running but had a stop icon super imposed that stops the scene on tap. It would also give users confidence that the scene running.
  Additionally, scenes should be able to be configured such that they cannot be run if it is already running or if other scenes (add as dependencies) are running. Those scenes icons could then show as disabled without a super imposed stop icon.

• Scene edit icon too small: it is far too easy to unintentionally activate the scene when the intention is to edit the scene.

• Limitations for shared users: Why can’t a user change the scheduled time of an Auto scene or even better, quickly add a temporary one-off auto scene? What should a user do who has shared access if they want to run the Long program in the early morning hours, get up to push the button? Is this smart?

• Protecting resources controlled by a running scene: when a scene is running, it should be able to lock resources (like switches) it controls. That would make coding actions of scenes much simpler.

• Lack of collaboration: useful would be if the UI would reflect with some prominence that another user is using the eWeLink app on the same home concurrently and allow chat, audio/video conferencing.

• eWeLink bug: while editing a scene, eWeLink app reports “Added to Home screen” if I click “Add to home screen” and then click Cancel or the back button but it doesn’t actually add the icon.

• Lack of event history: it would be extremely helpful for all users to have access to a log that shows the activated actions at least over the last few days.

Below are some screenshots from my screen.

[ward]

Hey

Big thx to your detailed and well-organized feedback!

I have sent your post to the App team. We will continuously seek optimization to better meet users’ needs.