Google home change brightness of group of lights with emulated_hue

Configuration
1

Is it possible to change the brightness of lights? Google Home confirms that it will change it but nothing happens.

1 Like
2

+1, is it also possible to select the colour via Google home on emulated Hue?

3

Yes, it works for me without any issue. Command spoken as:

Ok Google, set the basement lights to 20 percent

response:

Sure, setting 2 lights brightness to 20 percent.
4

The response I get is: Sure, setting the dining room brightness to 20 percent.
I.e. it doesn’t mention how many lights, and nothing happens. Turning on/off works fine.

Is there a good way to debug this? E.g. enable logging of what arrives at HA?

5

If you ask Google Assistant to dim individual lights does it successfully dim that particular light? As in, is the behavior across the board or specific to HA groups?

6

It works with an individual light, but not with the group that includes that and another light. I can dim the group manually via the HA web UI.

7

Are they set up as light and not switch?

8

Yes the lights are just lights and the groups are groups of lights. I don’t have any switches.

Also as I mentioned, the lights itself can be dimmed via Google Home, just not the groups.

9

I did some experimentation with groups and brightness last night. I am seeing the same behavior as @snairolf. Individual lights work as expected, and the GA responds to commands for groups correctly but nothing actually happens. I tried this with a group of that contained two Hue bulbs and a zwave dimmer.

Referring to the number of lights the GA thinks it’s controlling, I discovered some interesting behavior. The group entity from HA is one “light”, which is what I would expect. The individual lights are each a single “light” as well. So if I had just these three lights and one group that would be four lights that GA sees.

customize:
- entity_id: light.kitchen_ceiling__level_8_0
  friendly_name: Can Lights
- entity_id: light.kitchen_chandeli_level_4_0
  friendly_name: Kitchen Chandelier
- entity_id: switch.overcabinet_lig_switch_5_0
  friendly_name: Over-cabinet Lights
  
group:
  kitchen_lights:
  name: Kitchen Lights
  entities:
    - switch.overcabinet_lig_switch_5_0
    - light.kitchen_chandeli_level_4_0
    - light.kitchen_ceiling__level_8_0
    - light.pantry

This is where it gets interesting. If I ask Google Hey Google, turn on the Kitchen Lights I get Sure, turning two lights on and all four lights turn on.

If I change the name of the Kitchen Chandelier to not have the word “Kitchen” in it, then Google responds Sure, turning the Kitchen Lights on (which is the single device response), and all four lights come on.

So it looks like the GA is inferring groups based on the names of the devices. I think that the device count is indicative of the two “lights” the the GA sees, the group and the one light. @kylerw how are your lights named? Can you confirm my findings?

Back on topic, I did some digging and it doesn’t look like HA Groups support brightness control. The Emulated Hue component is handling the call from GA correctly and acknowledging your request, but the Group component doesn’t know what to do with it.
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/group-light-controls/500

10

The work around I’ve been using is to assign the groups using the “rooms” functionality in the Google Home app instead of the HA groups. This works okay but the GA occasionally gets amnesia about the room assignments and I have to reassign them.

I also have an Amazon Echo and tried the same setup there. That software seems more robust - I haven’t had any problems with Alexa forgetting my room assignments.