I’m just looking for a yay-nay on whether or not I can have a bunch of Phillips Hue bulbs in a room and make a One-Button thing I can press to have the lights turn on to the respective brightness I want. Rather than dozens of taps in the Hue App, I’d love a speed dial, as it were, that can do it all at once.
Can I pull this off in HA? Thank you for your time.
Yes, you can, though your question is not very specific as to what “thing” you expect to press to get this result.
Fair, and thank you. Something in the HA iOS app is what I had in mind.
How are your lights connected? Are you using a Hue hub, or Bluetooth?
I’m using a Hue hub and routinely use the Hue. I’m just beginning with HA, and I’ve an Intel NUC with Sonoff Zigbee and Zooz 800 Z-Wave adapters.
You probably already know you can group lights into zones and rooms, which lets you turn them on/off as a group “speed-dial” style. If you’re sticking with the hub, it will probably actually be easiest even in HA if you’ve got them grouped logically in the app.
But there are obviously other advantages to using HA, and you don’t need to use the app’s grouping feature to accomplish the same thing in HA.
I’ve run out of different zones I can set up on the App. According to HA, I’ve got 93 Hue devices. I had to get a second hub at one point.
The living room is where I’d like to macro, with 3x 3-bulb corner assemblies, six recessed cans, three backlight bars, four lamp bulbs, and four candelabra bulbs. I’d love if I had a button in the HA app to turn on and set to given, repsective color temps all those devices.
You may need to turn on grouped lights in the integration so you can see them in Home Assistant.
That’s enough lights that you probably don’t want to use Home Assistant groups. If you do, it will send individual commands one at a time to each bulb, which may create a popcorn effect.
You can also redo your network so the Philips bulbs work through this instead of the Hue bridge and app. You’ll lose the app functionality, but it lets you manage everything through Home Assistant. In particular, it’s helpful if you end up buying battery-powered zigbee devices, because they will use the bulbs to build a mesh to connect to the network.
Regardless, once you have a single entity in HA you want to target, you can create a button in a dashboard to call the action to turn on the light. All the options are there to control brightness, colour, etc. You could even go a step further, and buy a physical button that triggers the same thing if you didn’t want to use your phone.