Grouping Lights & Alexa

I have some rooms with six IKEA downlighters in. When configured via the IKEA app these were arranged into rooms and then with an Alexa device in that room I could say “Alexa Turn Lights On”.

I have just switched one room over to my Zigbee2MQTT mesh but I can’t figure out how to group these so they can be controlled as one. I see references the updating groups.yaml but I am guessing this is the old way and there is a different wat of doing this now?

I did create a group in Zigbee2MQTT but that didn’t appear in HA. I have grouped the lights in Alexa but it just says “playroom is not responding”.

What is the best way to set this up so all six lights can be controlled as one and also have Alexa work with just the “turn lights on” command?

You can just create a routine in alexa which turn all on with voice command turn lights on.

But I cannot have multiple routines called turn lights on can I? Currently (via the IKEA app) if I am in the lounge and say “Alexa turn lights on” the lounge lights come on and if I am in the playroom then the playroom lights come on (separate Alexa devices added to groups in )

Interestingly if I click on the overall lights button for the room in th Alexa app this does toggle the lights just not through voice control

Ok my stupidity at play… The Alexa device I was playing with was on someone else’s profile. Just adding the individual lights to a room in the Alexa app does make this work fine.

How can I setup HA to control all the lights as one (brightness, colour and power)

You can do this two different ways:

  1. Use groups in Z2M: | Zigbee2MQTT - Using this method, you’ll need to add the group manually to HA via yaml. The benefit here is that all the lights will act in unison via Zigbee grouping.

  2. Create the group in HA directly via the group list in configuration.yaml. The downside to this approach is that you can end up with a popcorn effect (where some lights might respond faster than others because HA issues a command to each light individually rather than as a Zigbee group).

Depending on the method you choose, you’ll end up with either a light.[group_name] (from option #1) or group.[group_name] (from option #2) entity that you can control from HA.

Personally, I would go with #1 as it gets rid of popcorn lighting and is faster in terms of response.

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