Due to the persistent measures to contain the corona crisis, a trip to the cinema is not so evident… But fear not – with OpenMotics you can bring the cinema feeling into your living room!
Today, Netflix released some great series and movies: Black Butler (Season 3), American Murder: The Family Next Door, The Boys in the Band… So make yourself comfortable, get into your sofa and make your living room feel like a real movie theater with just a few smart home tricks.
Reduce the number of actions with a scene
On a normal movie night, you’ll need to take at least 4 steps to create the perfect cinema feeling. Your preparation will look a lot like this:
- Turn the TV on.
- Dim all living room lights.
- Turn all other lights off.
- Close the shutters.
What if we can tell you, you can replace these steps with just one push of a button? Yes, that’s right. We’ll tell you how to do a step-by-step configuration of a movie scene. The only thing you’ll need is your laptop.
How to create your own movie scene
To create the perfect cinema feeling, you’ll need to create an automation in the OpenMotics Cloud. An automation is an action in which with one command (pressing a push button or button in the app) different outputs (lighting, screens, switched sockets) are brought into a personalized setup.
To create an automation you’ll first need to follow these easy steps:
- Go to http://cloud.openmotics.com
- Log in with your account
- Go to ‘Settings’
- Go to ‘Automations’
- Click on ‘Add new’
- Give your automation the name ‘Movie scene’
Next up, you’ll need to make a puzzle. How your puzzle will look depends on what you want your movie scene to do. We’ll show you how to implement the three steps from before.
Turn on your TV
Go to “Action” and click on the piece of the puzzle “Turn output/dimmer on”. Drag it under “Start”. In the first blank space you’ll be needing to add an “Environment” with the name “Output”. Now choose the output of your TV.
Turn off all lights
Go to ‘“Action” and click on the piece of the puzzle “Turn all lights on”. Drag it under the last piece of the puzzle. Click the arrow and change it to “Turn all lights off”.
Turn on the lights you’ll be using
Go to “Action” and click on the piece of the puzzle “Turn dimmer on with dimmer at…”. In the first blank space you’ll be needing to add an “Environment” with the name “dimmer”. If you drag this into the blank space, you can click the arrow. Now choose the dimmer in the living room. In the second blank space, you’ll be needing to add a “Value” with the name “dimmer at…”. After dragging it into the blank space, you can click the arrow and choose the percentage for the dimmer.
If you have more dimmers in the living room, you can repeat this step for every dimmer.
Close your blinds
Go to “Action” and click on the piece of the puzzle “let shutter/shutter group up”. In the blank space you’ll need to drop the environment with the name “Shutter”. By clicking on the arrow you can choose the shutter you want. Next, you’ll need to change ‘up’ to ‘down’ by again clicking the arrow.
If you have more shutters in the living room, you can repeat this step for every shutter.
At the end, this is what your automation should look like:
In just a few minutes of work, you’ll now have created a movie scène you can use every night. How amazing is that? Oh, and don’t forget the popcorn ofcourse. Enjoy!
