Recipes¶
Recipes are worked examples of real-world scene setups. Each one starts from something you might want to happen in your home, shows the scene group to build for it, lays out the scenes in the order Ambience evaluates them, and — most importantly — explains why the group is shaped that way.
Unlike Getting started, which walks a single example end to end, recipes are self-contained and focus on the design of a scene group: which scope and category to use, how the scenes cascade, and which conditions you can safely leave out.
Recipes describe the shape, not your exact entities
A recipe names kinds of entities ("the lounge lights", "a presence sensor") rather than your specific entity IDs. Adapt the scope, category and entity choices to your own home as you build the group in the panel.
Each recipe leans on Ambience's cascade: within a scene group the scenes are evaluated top to bottom and the first one whose conditions all pass wins. For the full model, see Scene priority.
Available recipes¶
Bathroom¶
The devices we automate in our bathroom (see the overview):
- Blind — open and close the bathroom blind by time of day, and ease it open on bright mornings without overriding a manual adjustment.
- Extractor fan — turn the extractor fan on when someone uses the shower or toilet, and off again once the bathroom has been vacant for a while.
- Lights — dim the bathroom lights to suit the time of day, switch them off when the room is vacant, and drop to 1% at night when the adjoining bedroom is in bed mode.
- Power Shower — run the pump's high-pressure mode while someone's in a shower, then bleed the pressure back to normal through the garden irrigation once they leave.
- Towel rack — dry the towels after a shower by running the heated rack for a couple of hours, even when a second person showers before it finishes.
Bedroom¶
The devices we automate in our bedroom (see the overview):
- Blinds — close the bedroom blinds at dusk and open them again in the morning, but only once the room has been vacant long enough to trust that nobody's still asleep in bed.
- Lights — turn the lights on by time of day when someone enters, drop to reading mode when they get into bed, and lean on time buffers to survive flaky presence sensors.
Kitchen / Dining Room¶
An open-plan kitchen and dining room split into separate lighting spaces (see the overview):
- Dining Room — fade the table light by time of day while someone's seated, and drop it quickly when the projector's on.
- Kitchen — low light when you step up to the island, brighter once you settle in to cook, off quickly when the projector's on.
Security¶
- House alarm — lock the front door when the alarm arms, and disarm the alarm when someone unlocks the door.