Change brightness of a light group without turning on lights that are off

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

I used to have my hue/innr lights voice control going from google home -> phillips hue cloud -> my network.

Back then i could say on my google home turn down the brightness or set the brightness and it would only change the brightness of the lights that were currently on.

Now Ive moved to deconz and home assistant, the voice control goes google home -> nabu casa -> my network. Unfortunately if i issue the same command it does change the brightness to any light in the google home room but it also turns on any lights that were off.

It seems like this is a limitation in home assistant. I checked deconz there is a service called deconz_configure that lets you change values. I tested:

field: /groups/5/action
data: {"bri" : 10}

and it works as i would expect and doesn’t turn any lights on but does adjust brightness of the ones that are on.

Looking through the docs https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/light/ It looks like that the only methods are turn on, turn off and toggle.

Without home assistant adding a method call setState or something similar Does anyone know how I can get the behaviour that I would like? Can i configure which service that the google home integration calls on a voice command?

2

IMO it’s limitation of HA as you said (I asked for the same a few times)
HA offers only 3 service calls for a light: turn_on, turn_off and toggle. There is no method to set light attributes otherwise than issuing turn_on.
I don’t understand why devs overlooked such a feature, the need seems to be so obvious. Maybe in the past there were no light sources which could support it.

As you figured out, the only way ito achieve it is to talk with light devices dodging HA. Unfortunately with this approach you cannot rely on HA’s light groups

1 Like
3

This is fine, all my lights are grouped in deconz anyway. Home assistant light groups don’t work very well in practice as it makes multiple API calls

Is there a way to change which service the assistant calls so to directly talks to deconz

4

I don’t know. I’m using mqtt which can be fed using publish service call with any data you want.

By the first glance deconz provides send and get services. So it should be possible.
Hope someone exoerienced with deconz can help you

5

I know enough about deconz (I think) to get what I want. Where im not sure is how to configure Google assistant to call a custom service instead of the normal ha light on service. Is it possible to creat fake entities that are wired to my deconz service and then expose them to Google?

6

Is anyone else able to help with this?

1 Like