Why can't we sync the state of two light entities without automation?

Archive Month of "What the heck?!" 2022
1

Why isn’t there a way to combine two light switches (light) as a single entity that are synchronized in state?

I own a couple of Haiku fans from the company BAF and one thing that is crazy annoying is they don’t have a light switch. I’ve written some automation where I have a “disconnected” smart switch in the wall that allows the user to turn on/off the fan from a traditional light switch when entering the room. Vice versa, if you decide to use the fan remote, automation turns the wall switch light on/off. In general, this works fine, but in the case of dimming, things get really wild since you will get a ton of events during dimming for different brightless levels that can lead to a disco like effect when they are processed.

It’d be amazing to be able to combine both light switches as a single entity and have HA treat them as a single entity vs separate. This would prevent enable HA to send configurations to the device and not worry about state changes causing a storm of light1 applied this change, so light 2 needs to react, but since light 2 reacted, now light 1 needs to react again.

Hope this makes sense.

Thank you!

2

just create a light group.

here is the example from the docs:


Example YAML configuration of a light group:

# Example configuration.yaml entry

light:
  - platform: group
    name: "Kitchen Lights"
    entities:
      - light.kitchen_ceiling_lights
      - light.kitchen_under_cabinet_lights
      - light.kitchen_spot_lights
      - light.pendant_lights