I've combed the forums, SmartHome Wiki's, and Google for weeks looking for tips on setting up my large great room. I have found plenty of tidbits for various aspects of the project, but it doesn't seem to be coming together, with my latest effort last night resulting in some kind of loop flashing the lights on/off/on/off/on/off all over the room.

The setup is this - we have a large great room, with seven banks of lights in different area (dining, bar, living, piano, etc). In this room when we bought the house, were Lutron 4-button hard-wired control pads, with some kind of ability to effect "scenes" on the switches they were wired to. I could find no information on the Internet for this technology and how to make updates to it, and repeated calls to Lutron Tech elicited a lot of "...uhhhh..."s.

So I decided to go with Insteon SwitchLinc Dimmers and KeypadLincs. There are 7 SwitchLinc Dimmers, with 5 KeypadLinc control pads installed. I have the licensed Pro version of Indigo 5.0.4. The individual SwitchLinc's work great, and now I am trying to get the KeypadLinc's working. I would sum up my issues in three categories:

1) How to make buttons on KeypadLincs operate as "radio buttons" - one on, all others off. I found instructions on how to do this with a single KeypadLinc manually, but those same instructions also say they highly recommend using software to accomplish this. I am having a hard time figuring out how I make Indigo do this for me (am I supposed to Link the buttons one by one? That's as much work as doing it manually. Or create triggers?) Once I figure this out, then I need to figure out:

2) How to make 5 KeypadLincs operate in coordinated fashion (Press button A on any pad, and the others react the same). I tried creating a "scene" controlled by an action group, which turned off all the appropriate buttons on the other keypads, but that was a LOT of work for just one button, much less doing it for all the others. I then tried to use the Python interface, thinking some fancy cut/paste/regex would help bust out the needed action group and scene steps and avoid all the mouse clicking, but that was VERY slow to execute - it literally took 45 seconds to change a scene, and you could look around the room and see buttons turning on/off, one every second or so.

3) How should I be controlling the scenes on these SwitchLincs? I think this is closely tied to 2) above, and whether I have to control button states with the scenes or not. Do I link a button on the Keypads to the scene? Or to an action group that fires a scene? Or do I just trigger the scene or action group based on the button change state event? Do I have to link/trigger every button on every pad? If yes how do I avoid every sync'ed Keypad button that changes state, from firing the scene or action group?

I am reasonably familiar with using the basics of Indigo - I have all our exterior lights on SwitchLinc's controlled by Indigo schedules using conditions, as well as our landscape lighting. I just seem to have some sort of mental block figuring out how to implement this more complex setup with scenes, SwitchLinc Dimmers, and KeypadLinc's.

I am hoping someone can help me understand what concepts I am missing, or the best way to think about implementing the great room setup. There seems to be at least 2-3 ways to do each step, and the right combination thereof, eludes me

Many thanks,
Chris

1. Indigo doesn't support creating the radio button groups on the KPL's so you'll need to do it manually on each one. The good news is that you really only have to do it once…
2. I don't know what you want to do with the buttons - but you can use INSTEON linking to link all the buttons together as both controllers and responders. This should keep the buttons in sync such that when one goes on they all go on and vice versa. If whatever else you want to do is also completely INSTEON commands (turn on/off lights, etc) then you can also include those devices as responders in the same group. Read the Multi-Way wiki article and the links from it - that should give you a better idea of how to use linking.
3. You can do either direct INSTEON links or have Indigo execute Action Groups based on the button pressed. Both have advantages and disadvantages (the article linked above describes those). I personally would do direct INSTEON links because the response will be faster (Indigo is out of the loop once the links are done). Maintenance is a bit more difficult, but once you get it like you want it then you generally don't have to mess with it any more. If, however, there are some non-INSTEON things you want to do then you'll need to go with having Indigo execute actions in response to the state changes.

The article linked in #2 (and the articles that it links to) should familiarize you with the different ways of handling these kind of tasks.

That's great Jay, thanks for the advice. I will dig in some more...