Put an option to create a Zigbee Group when creating a HA group. Similar to Hubitats “Enable Zigbee Group Messaging”. This is another feature I am kinda surprised is not available in HA. I would like to keep the groups the same and not have to go into Zigbee config to create groups and not sure who wants their lights not turning on at the same time in the same room.
Well it is available in z2m. And in zha.
So this is solved?
I never habe used this ZigBee groups feature. I just create HA groups, and that’s wonderful. I can jroup ZB + Wi-Fi bulbs!
A ZigBee group will send one message from the coordinator to the device. Less traffic, and the devices change at same time.
we’re talking 200 bytes here.
in my experience groups of bulbs with disparate tech work perfectly fine and turn on at the same time.
That wasn’t my experience a few years ago. So I used groups and it worked. Z2m and ha have come a long way. I’m too senior to change.
Sending it to a group and having them all turn on at the same time is must… Lets say you have 7 ceiling lights and sending the command to each or a normal HA group does not turn them on at the same time and its noticeable. VERY noticeable. I know you can create groups in ZHA for this but then what is the point of the HA group and vice versa. It would be really nice to just create all groups in HA and have the toggle to make it a zigbee group like Hubitat does. This would be a much appreciated feature.
Given that there are 2 or 3 major zigbee implementations for HA, it is more than a toggle. I do get what you are saying though…
It’s both solved and not.
There is a workaround (create a Zigbee group in Z2M → it will create a HA group as well).
But the requested feature is for the other direction: to be able to create a group in HA that would make a Zigbee group under the hood.
Reasoning: I want to keep my configuration mostly in one place (being HA–centered).
The other way would require the config flow of setting up a group to be able to enumerate the integrations that have this capability (three or four flavors of Zigbee, and ZWave direct association (if you want zigbee the ZWave and knx and all other flavors will ask for the same.) and the figure out how to set it up. (hubitat doesn’t have this limitation because of how they implement zigbee and ZWave. It’s in or it’s not. They don’t have integrations like that for that function unless it’s changed very recently…)
Without a common definition between the integrations to inform the group creation process that this is possible I don’t see how it CAN happen otherwise you have to make a TON of assumptions which then leads to bugs.
So Tom solved as much as it can be without some major architecture stuff that probably won’t ever happen?