Home Control Assistant
The Visual Scene Editor (VSE) is a tool provided to help create stored scenes in Insteon devices.
Suppose you have a bunch of lights you want to all go on at the same time to various preset levels, you can of course do this in HCA with a Visual Program, but Insteon allows a single scene command to which each device will respond to a certain set value - the result is much quicker response to commands.
In HCA it is simple to create this scene: From the menu select Insteon - Visual Scene Editor. This opens a dialog to select the scene to edit. Click on the "Create New Scene..." button to start creating a new scene. Give the Scene a name, choose the device and key to control the scene, and click "OK" button.
You will now be in the VSE - shown in the HCA display pane - with a scene which has a controller but nothing is controlled yet.
To add devices to this scene, you drag devices from the Design Pane (left) onto the VSE in the display pane - HCA allows dragging only devices that can be controlled.
When you drop the device on the display pane in the VSE, a pop-up dialog displays asking for the parameters (brightness level and ramp rate) for that device in that scene.
Continue to drop devices in the scene. Suppose you want a single scene which includes all of your outside lights, so that you can turn all of the outside lights on at the same time to a specified brightness level. You can create an outside "high" scene which puts them all at 100% and an outside "normal" scene which puts them all at lower levels to save electricity and light bulbs but still provide light.
Once you have all of the devices you want in the scene and the settings are as you want, right click on the VSE background and select "Program" to program the scene into the devices.
Think of scenes as just a web of links, linking a controller action to a bunch of preset levels in devices. Activating the scene (controller button goes on) sets all of the devices to the specified levels. Deactivating the scene (controller button goes off) turns off lights, switches, and button indicators.
What the VSE provides is an automated way to link many devices at programmed levels to one controller action. HCA Triggered scenes can be activated under program control, while button controlled scenes do the same thing as what would happen if you were to manually link the devices together, except that HCA does all of the linking so you don't need to run around the house pushing buttons.