How do you group lights so they dim together?

I’m brand new to the smartthings community and I’m very excited to be here. I need a little help though. I know it’s possible to group lights together so they can be dimmed all at the same time but I can’t find very good instructions on how to do so. Everything is a few years old and I’m guessing smartthings has renamed some of the menus or something. Anyone have any update instructions on how to do this? I tried using a smartapp but got confused fairly quickly. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

The short answer is that there is at present no easy official way to do this. :disappointed_relieved:

There are two ways.

The medium way is to use custom code and select a smart app specifically designed for this function like “dim and dimmer” or “dim with me.”

If you haven’t use custom code before take a look at this overview FAQ for the basic approach.

Then if that seems like something you would like to do, look through the community created smart app section for specific individual lighting apps.

https://community.smartthings.com/c/projects-stories/created-smart-apps

The hard way is to get involved with the alpha testing for core (Community’s own rules engine). Very powerful very sophisticated very complicated rules engine which is currently in its very first development steps. So lots of glitches and you may from time to time have to remove everything and start all over again as changes are made to the code. But you will be directly involved with the designer and can help influence features.

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Thank you so much for the prompt reply. I will go through the first couple things and see if I can pull it off. Thanks again. I’ll try and report with my findings!

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I recently reconfigured a room and ended up using the smart app Dim With Me that @jdroberts suggested. It’s very effective at coordinating groups of lights and can be tied into motion detection or other triggers via the main Smart Lights app.

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@tsatrom
Get an Amazon Echo… You can group lights together in the Alexa app and then control the lights and dim levels with voice commands. Been working great for me this week!

@HouseSmarts I do have an echo and have set that up. Works great. Problem is I have kids and sometimes talking and having Alexa respond isn’t convenient. Also, I like to have them be controlled from my phone if needed.

@GuyInATie Thank you. I’ll check this out. Haven’t had time to play around with device handlers yet. Look forward to learning them and understanding it better.

In large part because of this topic, I’ve now added a page to the community – created wiki that will allow you to quick browse the forum category for community-created smartapps that I linked to above .

For example, there is a link which will take you to a list of smartapps for lighting and only for lighting. :sunglasses: Should make it much faster to check out possible solutions.

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=How_to_Quick_Browse_the_Community_Created_Smartapps