New to HA this week and am very impressed and satisfied with the ease of setting up and configuring my Pi3+ with a HUSBZB1 (only for zigbee right now) and networked via WiFi. Integrations include WeMo, TP-Link, Tuya, Honeywell (dashboard), and ZHA. It has been easy to pair EcoSmart, Smart+, Tradfri, sengled, and Linkind bulbs and incorporate several Lutron Connected Bulb Remotes (CBR).
GOOD:
In configuration.yaml I have created a light: platform: group for four Smart+ zigbee bulbs in a ceiling fan. The Hue Emulation allows me to add the group as a light and Alexa finds this and controls on/off and brightness nicely. Used Automations so a CBR can turn all four bulbs on and off as a group.
BAD:
Automations for CBR dim up and dim down buttons can’t access the group and must adjust the brightness of the group sequentially (cute?!!?), though the group entity has a brightness slider. Also can’t assign the group to an area, and all four bulbs AND the group show up under LIGHT in the default dashboard.
Any suggestions or ideas to better configure and manage these four bulbs so they work in unison? And is there any reason to configure the group in the groups.yaml file instead of configuration.yaml?
What do you mean with they can’t access the group? Can you please show the code of the automation that is not working?
That’s expected behaviour as far as I know,because the light group doesn’t have a unique_id.
The best would be to create the group on the zigbee side, I don’t know how to do this with ZHA as I use something else for zigbee. When you create the group on the zigbee side, it will be imported in Home Assistant as an additional light.xxx entity, which can be added to an area.
When you create a light group in Home Assistant and send a command to turn it on/off, Home Assistant will send 4 commands (one for each bulb) to the ZigBee USB stick. This can lead to delayed/lost messages and therefore your lights not turning on/off together or at all.
However, when you create a group on the zigbee side and send the command to turn the light on/off, only one command will be sent to the zigbee USB stick and the message will be propagated automagically to the respective bulbs.
Also note, in Home Assistant group =/= light group
Found my way to the Groups in ZHA and all is well. That direction also made available to me the very Wink-like behavior of being able to use the Connected Bulb Remotes in either Touchlink (Lightlink) mode where the middle buttons brighten and dim, in addition to the Device “button pressed” mode to create automations with scenes.