Rooms

Revision as of 00:32, 4 January 2009

All the devices and scenes in Vera are grouped by rooms. So you must list the rooms in your house, and then on the devices page, you need to specify which rooms your devices are in. Some devices, like handheld controllers, may be used throughout the house. In this case, just pick the room where the device is most commonly used or kept. The sole purpose of rooms is to help organize your devices and scenes so you can find them easily and and keep track of which is which. So you don't have to take the term "Room" too literally. You could, for example, create a "Room" called "Back yard" or "Outdoors", or even a room called "John's stuff".

When you create a scene you generally add the scene to a room as well, namely whatever room you are most likely to want to use the scene in. Again, this is just to help organize your scenes and remember which scene is which. Note that what room you add a scene to does not have any effect on what devices it can control. For example, you can create a scene in the "Living Room" that turns on bedroom lights. Create the scene in whatever room you are most likely to want to use that scene. The reason for putting scenes in rooms is just to make it easier to keep track of which scene is which and to quickly find the scenes for the room you are in. For example, on the remote controls like iPhone and mobile phones, when you enter a room you need only pick the room you are in once. Then you will see all the scenes in that room without being distracted by all the other scenes in other rooms. This also means you can create multiple scenes with the same name in different rooms. For example, you may have 3 scenes called "go to bed" in 3 different bedrooms. Each scene will do something different.

There may be a couple scenes that are not really tied to a room, or are used throughout the home or in different rooms. For example, you may have a scene called "Entertaining Mode" which you use when guests arrive. You could put this scene in any room that will allow you to easily find it, remember the purpose of putting scenes in rooms is solely to make it easier for you to find the scenes. In a case like this, "Entertaining Mode" would probably be put in the "Entry Room" or "Living Room" if that's where you usually greet your guests. If you truly want a "global scene", meaning a scene that you would normally use from anywhere in the home, then you will note on the Scenes tab there is a special place "global scenes" to add those scenes. If you add a scene to "global scenes", then it's like adding to every room. For example, say you create a global scene called "Energy savings mode" that turns off all the lights in the home. And, say you have an iPhone you use a remote control. The iPhone will let you pick the room it's in, but no matter what room you pick, you'll see the global scene "Energy savings mode". If the iPhone is in the Living Room, you'll see the global scene PLUS the scenes in the Living Room. The global scenes appear in every room. On the Dashboard the global scenes appear at the top.

For more advanced users, if you have a very large house, or if you want to create graphical floorplans to control the devices with icons, you can also create "Sections", and organize the rooms by section. Examples of sections may be: "First Floor" and "Second Floor", or "Main House", "Guest House" and "Grounds". Create sections by clicking the "Advanced" tab and choosing the sub-tab "Sections". You can create a floorplan for each section using your favorite paint or draw program and upload them to Vera on that page. You can also position the devices on the floorplan. Before you do this, go back to the Rooms tab and be sure to indicate which section each room is in. Since most users don't create sections, by default, Vera has only one section "My Home" and all rooms are put there.