Groups in Lovelace?

Configuration
1

It used to be that a primary use case of groups was to define dashboard view cards. Now with the advent of Lovelace that seems to no longer be required. However, groups is still a helpful concept. Is there a way to define a group in the UI that I haven’t found yet?

My use case is to create a group of kid’s electronics and turn internet on and off through the Unifi integration during certain hours. At the moment this works well but I have a long list of individual devices in the automation. Would be more efficient to manage the devices in a group and not change the automation every time a new device is added.

I can just create a group.kid_devices the traditional way and activate a switch.turn_on service and I assume this will work, but I would have thought by now groups would be a first class thing in HA.

I have considered if the group could be defined as a scene or maybe something else (light.group?) - any best practices here? I have found that mixing manual configurations and lovelace created configurations/automations can have spotty results.

TIA

2

Oh, as an addendum, if I create a card with a “group” of entities, there is an option to create a switch for the group. Is this “card group” entity accessible to automations directly? Not sure I would always want to create a card to form a group but in this case I have already done so - could be a short cut. Thanks

3

Groups still can’t be configured through the UI. You can configure areas in the UI, which recently became some love, such as being able to add entities instead of devices only to areas.