I'm specifically looking for examples on how people make things flow. For example, lets say you have lighting, do you do a list or representation of the Rooms with lighting control, the user selects the roomo and adjust the lights?

Do you use a global lighting control page, say on a Tablet, where they can control all the lights? Do you provide a Lighting button which then goes to Main Whole House Scenes and then room selection?

I see the GUI layout samples from all the GUI providers, but I'm curious how programmers are actually tying it all together. I think video samples would be best. 

Lighting on a hand held remote IMO should be limited to the zone you are in. I would even go a step further and limit it to a few scenes like High Medium Off and maybe intermission in a theater or surround zone. Maybe dim up and down to go with that. on/off toggle for nearby zones in a basement rec room might also fit. Just dont go beyond 7 buttons (like a lutron keypad). Anything more than that warrants a tablet.

I think the iPad/other tablets have changed the game a little. So instead of trying to cram everything into a 2way T3V for example you can have an iPad and a T1-B or T2-B in video zones.

This solves two problems. 1.You have a back up controller in your zone so no more crazy angry customers when a battery dies or a remote fails. 2. It gives you the ability to keep the hand held focused and straight to the point in terms of what it controls. Single zone control of everything.

The moment the customer wants to start navigating the other rooms of the house they grab the iPad. The rest of the time they have a light weight ergonomic easy to navigate hand held remote. Trying to make a handheld remote be a multizone controller is a pita and trying to get people to accept the iPad as a handheld remote is a pita. So give them the both.

Back on topic :)

Lights, climate, security are subsystems that are global. Because of this i like to make unified menus for them . What i mean by that is the menu is the same no matter what room you are in. The only difference would be "quick functions" that are room specific like a vitual representation of your lighting keypad (high medium low off etc)

You can handle lights with a floor plan. On the sides of the floor plan page you can have quick keys that operate lights for the zone you are in. Your virtual keypad. If a zone is lit it means at least 1 load is on in that area. Pressing a zone on the floor plan can be a on off scene toggle. Press and hold can make a popup appear with full control/settings of every load in that zone. This is where you would go in an adjust every load in a room and save scenes etc.

Or you can handle lights with buttons that have room names on them. It would function the same way as the floor plan idea but it would be much easier to do because you don't have to create floor plan graphics for every project. I personally think the floor plans are cool and im sure they sell systems because clients think "wow thats so cool". But i also feel they are not necessary because you can get the same functionality with buttons. The biggest problem i face is that the damn blueprints i get are never accurate. The shape of rooms change the room names change etc. Makes it a total pita. Much easier to just add or delete another button and change the room name.

So 1 press gets you to the lights menu where you can..

Quickly control the zone you are in with the virtual keypad.

Quickly enable or disable a whole house scene.

Quickly toggle other zones in the home on or off with the touch of a button.

Press and hold a zone for level control of every load in the home. IMO most clients dont need this. If you implement it make sure you sell it as a feature. it can consume a lot of time. The nice thing about the press and hold to get to this menu is that you can easily disable it and its like it was never there.

These screenshots who the lights main page in the first screen shot. You can see that lights is selected in the top main nav bar. You can see that Floor 1 is selected and you are in the kitchen. You can see that the kitchen scene is medium and its the only room with lights on for the first floor.

Second screenshot shows the press/hold popup. Here you have individual control of every load. I left the scene buttons (left side right side) on there because i thought it was nice to have them. Obviously you can remove them.

This is a GUI i started working on last year so dont pay attention to the fact that its unfinished. This is why its super blank. I only used it because i had the blank screenshots of both versions so i just copy/pasted buttons on each.

Stamp-

Awesome work.

Thanks. I haven't worked on that template in a long time. Someday :)

I'm still shocked that you only/mainly use fireworks...

Nice work Mac.

Between 98-00 i was determined to become a web designer lol. I taught myself html and css at w3schools and built this site [Link: burzurq.com] . Its 100% pure html/css and coded in notepad. After the site was done i needed a logo... I googled "graphic creation software" and found Fireworks.

My first graphic....



Its a photo of a subway platform with text on top. Boy oh boy was i proud of that :). Once i started playing with fireworks i got totally bored with web design and forgot all about it until i started wiremunky/guijaboard a few years ago. Crazy how everything connects. Who knew that those hobbies would come in handy...

I have a Philips TSU9400 and what I did is create a separate lighting page (which I rarely use) that allows minute control of every fixture but then put two buttons on every other page (in the same place on the page - in my case on two of the hard buttons) labeled "Lights Off" and "Lights On."

The former sets up a dimmed video watching lighting scheme and the latter turns everything back on. 99% of the time these are the only two settings I care about.

David

@Stamp...or anyone...this has come back up. With my current GUI there is room selection in the "Rooms" list for every AV room and a Global Option for party modes, etc. When a room is selected, the source/activity options for that room show up, included in that list is Lighting. 

I have a control thumb bar that has master raise/lower for ALL lights in the selected room, directly below the volume. I think this will be used 95% of the time. 

So having the LIGHTS option as an activity for that room made sense to me at first but isn't so much now because I then have to include in the Master ROOMS list EVERY single room that has lighting. 

So now I'm thinking that I NEED to have a "LIGHTS" Tab key or hot key that is present ALWAYS. Pressing it will take the user to a MAIN LIGHTS page that will have the list of rooms included in lighting. I think having a separate rooms list for lighting makes sense because rarely will they be invidually controlled from the interface and so it doesn't make sense to cludge up that AV rooms list that will be used all the time. 

So i'm really leaning toward something like what Stamp has done where it shows all the rooms, and you can quickly toggle any room on/off and press+hold will popup load control for that room. Now time to work ;-)

This is how i have decided to do lights. FYI this is still a work in progress. Its a large house with a lot of rooms and it had to have floor plan view.

I decided to make the LIGHTS button in the navigation bar bring up a popup that shows controls for the currently selected room.

So lets say you are in the theater and your touchpanel room selection is set to Theater. When you press Lights you will see the page below and the controls will be for the theater. Simple ON OFF. Global Scenes. Individual load control. And a big red button that takes you to the floor plan selection menu.



This is the floor plan selection menu. You can choose a room/building/area. Room Names are buttons. If there is a yellow rectangle it means the room has a light on.

Room names are ON-OFF toggles when pressed. This lets you quickly shut off or light up areas around the home/property.

Room names when pressed+held will bring up the original room control menu for the area you pressed+held. For example if you press hold the 3rd floor Theater button the room control popup menu appears with simple ON Off/Global Scenes/Load controls.

Every room on every floor plan has its own "Individual Room Control" menu. There is really only 1 sub page in the vtpro file. The rest is done with SIMPL.




Because of the size of the house i couldn't use nice light bulb icons so i had to opt for yellow rectangles. There are no other lighting controls on the touchpanel anywhere. No quick keys or thumb menus. If the client wants to control lights they have to press the lights button on the navigation menu.

Most of my projects are retrofit so getting any plans is unlikely so I would have to come up with a floor plan layout on my own and probably not worth the time. 

So here is what I have so far. Right now the thumb control bar on the right is basically control for the current room, where you can raise/lower volume and the lights. By pressing the light bulb it toggles ALL ROOM LIGHTS on/off. I may make is so that if you press and hold the light, individual load controls for that room pop-up as well. 

Because I'm programming in SB, this IS a separate subpage for every room, so it gets to be a lot of I add the light popup for every room. These screen shots are from VTPro, so don't mind the gesture lists as they lap on top each other. 




Right now the ROOM LIST at the top just shows the AV Rooms and a GLOBAL/PARTY typce option. The activity list on the left shows the options available for the selected room. 

I'm thinking that because LIGHTING is global and since there are rooms with lighting, but not AV, maybe I should have a always there LIGHTS option, sort of like the POWER button that flips the user to the lighting main page which shows all the room lights. For now, the LIGHTS option in the room activities list changes to the lights main page. 

On the lights main page, if you press and hold a room, the room load controls pops up. I think on the thumb control bar on the right, I could maybe have it longer and have it section off into HOUSE and then ROOM control areas.

OR the big light icon that I have now, instead of toggling room lights on/off, i could limit it to JUST raise/lower, and then make it do the page flip to the main lighting page. 

I just worked this up as my PARTY page. with this the volume and lights controls on the right control ALL ROOMS

Each room shows active source name so that you can see if something is currently on in a room before you change it, the button 'glow' shows if the room is on/off and for the source just shows which source is selected.

The activity list on the left when PARTY is selected, only does a page flip to the source control page.

Individual volume control under each room name. This isn't huge job so I can fit it hear, otherwise I would have a separte popup with all the room volume controls simliar to what Sonos does. 

The bottom list of buttons will be party mode options. For example one will send APPL TV Video to ALL TV's plus a couple global lighting scenes like ALL lights 25%. etc. Basically just custom to what the client wants. Maybe a couple quick options to send a source to ALL rooms.