Custom buttons allow you to quickly execute programming from the on screen navigator or remote. It’s also useful with the iPhone GUI. There are a limited number of funtions you can’t directly perform with the iPhone app, but custom buttons will get around this. Click on the title above to find out how

First, we need to go to agents in composer at the bottom left. At the top left select custom buttons. Now in the middle left you will see all the rooms in your project. Whatever room you select here is what room you have to be on in the navigator to see the custom button you create. You can also select “all rooms” if you want access to the button at all times without having to change rooms. In this example I’ll choose “all rooms”. In the middle pane you now see 4 boxes. Each box represents a corner of the navigator screen (this will make more sense as we go on). So pick a box and select “add”.

After you press add a pop-up box appears. In this box we need to give a “screen name” that will appear on the navigator in one of the corners, so name it something you will want to see. For this write-up I named it “A/V Rooms Off”. You can program up to 6 buttons per corner (box). For each button I picked 6 rooms that I commonly use for audio or video and named them accordingly.

With that setup, we can begin the programming. On the bottom left of composer go to programming. Find the custom button on the top left of composer (Device Events pane). Click on the scroll down box below that and select the custom button you want to program, in my case A/V Rooms Off. As you see, my 6 individual buttons for each room pull up.

I then clicked on living “press” and on the right side of composer (Device Actions pane) I select my living room. Below that I chose “Turn the room off” and dragged that to the middle.

I did this with each of the 6 rooms I made custom buttons for. I then refresh the navigator with composer (with the iphone you also have to go to info->config->update). This will now make your new custom buttons show up on the gui. The one for this write-up is at the bottom left in the screen shot.

I can now turn the audio/video off in any of these rooms with 2 button presses. First press the “A/V Rooms Off” tab which then pulls up the actual 6 buttons. Press the button to whatever room I want off and it’s done.

Another use for this is that, while the iphone gui is the absolute bomb, there are a few functions you can’t directly control. The main one is that the 2/3/6 button keypads don’t show up anywhere. I have a button on my 6 button keypad in the master bedroom that serves as my “goodnight” button. It turns off all the lights/audio/video, sets the alarm, and closes the garage door bays. I created a custom button for this under a corner of the gui called lights. Press that tab and one of the 6 custom buttons it pulls up says “goodnight”. I’ve programmed that button to push the button on my 6 button keypad in the master bedroom for me.

If you run out of custom buttons you can also choose lighting scenes with or without loads attached. Then program whatever you want to execute when the lighting scene is pushed. Lighting scenes are also very accessible on the iphone gui. From the COP select Lights then All scenes, and now you have a list of all your lighting scenes to execute.

hope you enjoyed
Pharmdsmith

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