Today Hue added Zones in their App to be able to create grouped lights other than ‘rooms’. This is a long and much needed development of the Hue platform imho.
Having tried it immediately, the zone I created appeared within a few seconds in HA, as a regular light.name entity.
No other than regular Hue groups, which are light.name entities in HA also, or a regular light for that matter.
Would there be any preference using the HA light.group above this new Hue zone?
In the short time I’ve have been able to turn-off /on the zone and add scenes to it, and the Hub is responding swiftly. All via the app.
Havent been able to set scenes using ‘hue.hue_activate_scene’ service yet, which is peculiar since it is a is_hue_group… Not sure what could be wrong there.
The Hue hassio integration doesn’t indicate it being a zone or group, which I have always found confusing, and maybe the devs could explore on that a bit more, now we have Hue lights, zones and groups…
I wonder if zones is not the same thing as a group since the integration already support it.
Why use a Zigbee group over a Hass group would be that it would be one request to the bridge to control multiple lights
for the current Hue integration yes, but in the Hue app we can now nest groups, which was long overdue.
there’s a new type: zone, which is not yet imported in Hue, so hope that will be developed also.
added a feature request.
yes, that’s what the new Hue Zone (group) does. I also believe that is what the HA light.group does (versus a regular HA group with individual lights as entities)
btw, couldn’t set the scenes to the newly created zone (group) and just found out it needs the scene_name in english, while all my other scenes are set in dutch…
edited the names in the app, et voila: immediate response
will file a Beta issue in the Hue community to create zone names in the app language …
Not exactly, but no reason to continue that discussion.
Not sure what you’re saying here, but I do like to understand if either using the new Zones or using Ha light.group would make a difference, and why.
ha light.group is just a grouping in hass and won’t improve towards hue compared to a hue_group.
light.group will still send a command per light for all lights in the group, where as a hue_group would send one command for the group which will then be a Zigbee broadcast message which is much more efficient
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Ok I see, thanks for explaining.
I must admit the response is immediate with the new Zone, so I can really advise using that.
Havent tested it in HA scenes yet, with delays and such, so will need to do so next.
Simply controlling on/off and setting Hue scenes works flawlessly, (and I mean from within HA).
Interesting. I have allow_hue_groups: false
I don´t use the Hue app at all so no point in having lights organized in the Hue app.
But my problem is that I have some light groups i Hass.io that don´t respond so well. My good night scripts needs sometimes several tries before the all lights go off.
If I make a zone will it show even if I have allow_hue_groups?
Will a 2 lights in a zone work better then 2 lights in i Hass.io light group?