G’day ST team. I was very pleased to see the addition of lighting groups in the latest ST app update (1.8.05.24). One issue I’ve noticed is that when I group my hue lamps together and then try to dim them over a set period of time through a routine, it forces me to select the white colour temperature that I wish to dim from and too. I actually have my hue lamps set to a purple light so when I try to dim the lamps it forces the lamp light colour to turn white. Is it possible to have the option to disable the colour temperature control and just set the dim levels in future app updates?
You may want to look at a community developed Edge driver for Hue. You can import scenes from the Hue app… so create a scene in Hue to dim your lights and import the scene into ST.
In case the OP is interested and has a SmartThings/Aeotec hub. All methods requiring Edge Drivers need a hub since that’s where the edge drivers run.
If someone doesn’t have a Smartthings/Aeotec hub, they can actuate a hue scene via an Alexa routine (not a SmartThings routine) or an IFTTT applet, but it’s more complicated.
Okay, the “Create lighting group” feature could be very useful! I have a set of three lights in the kitchen often used together (call them “Kitchen Work Lights”) and three circuits of outdoor/landscape lighting (call them “House Landscape Lights”) used daily as a group. Each has one circuit that’s on a dimmer and two just simple switches.
However, when creating a group, the group “dimmer” seems to be set/stuck at 16%. Changing it doesn’t seem to affect the lights when they are “on,” nor does a Scene allow the level to be set. Each dimmer switch uses the last level sent to that device.
Piggybacking on what the OP thinks would be a nice addition to this feature, let’s hope we’re seeing an early version of this new feature and both dimmer level as well as colour are fully implemented in some future release…
Yes, I do run a hub and I have the hue lights added using the BYS hue beta edge driver.
I feel that being able to dim and brighten lights on a changing schedule should be one of the core aspects of any smart home setup. I can dim or brighten hue lights using the hue app but this only seems to be on a fixed schedule e.g. at 11pm dim lights to off over a 20 minute period. This doesn’t help if I want to turn my lights on bright at sunset (as this time changes every day) and then dim them over the next hour as the ambient light decreases or dim my lights over a set period when my bedtime routine runs. I can do this with my tradfri bulbs by using the Zigbee light multifunction MC edge driver by Mariano but unfortunately these same options don’t exist in the BYS hue beta driver at this time. Thats why I was so excited to see that I now had the ability to dim or brighten lights through the new lighting group control but then at the same time extremely disappointed to find that the if my lights are set to a colour other than white, it forces the light to turn white before dimming.
I’ve been trying to keep all my automations running locally and can’t even work out a really good way to do this with the rules API (although I have found some workarounds) so for now I think I’ll have to stick to running these routines with additional controls through sharptools.