Hue Room/Group Support

[Collisionc]

Is this ever going to be a thing? Unless room support is added, using Hue B Smart smartapp (Which does support rooms/groups of lights) is realistically the easiest way to control a home with boatloads of hue lights, which kind of sucks because it’s not going to run locally.

There’s a big responsiveness difference when telling Alexa to turn off the room named “Everything”, than having her turn off a group defined within alexa named everything. The first will turn off all lights at the same time within 1-2~ seconds, the 2nd will turn off lights one at a time until they are all turned off, which can take up to 10 seconds with enough lights.

https://developers.meethue.com/documentation/core-concepts - It’s all part of hue’s api. This would also mean rather than having a list of 40+ lights, I would only have a list of 4-6 light rooms.

[rontalley]

Why not use webCoRE and a Virtual Switch and group them that way?

If Everything is Off
Then with Lights 1, 2, 3, 4, etc…
Turn Off

If Any of Lights 1, 2, 3, 4, etc… are On
Then with Everything
Turn On

If All of Lights 1, 2, 3, 4, etc… are Off
Then with Everything
Turn Off

If you wanted to get real fancy, you could use Trend Setter!

[RELEASE] Trend Setter

Trend Setter - A SmartApp for grouping devices Read First I am not usually one for releasing stuff I write because I am my own worst critic and usually self destruct before putting anything out into the general public (I've revised this post more times than I'd like to count). I am trying to change that behaviour... Although I am a software engineer by trade, I am not a Java/Groovy developer so I may not have written some of the code in the most efficient way. I expect this to change from feedback and as my knowledge grows. I tend to find I use the app to control a lot of things more than anything else so this is useful for that. I have only used this on an Android phone and can't be sure how it'll behave on an iOS device due to the parity issues between Android and iOS apps so give…

[jkp (Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated)]

There is also Trend Setter that can be used to create groups of Lights

[RELEASE] Trend Setter

Trend Setter - A SmartApp for grouping devices Read First I am not usually one for releasing stuff I write because I am my own worst critic and usually self destruct before putting anything out into the general public (I've revised this post more times than I'd like to count). I am trying to change that behaviour... Although I am a software engineer by trade, I am not a Java/Groovy developer so I may not have written some of the code in the most efficient way. I expect this to change from feedback and as my knowledge grows. I tend to find I use the app to control a lot of things more than anything else so this is useful for that. I have only used this on an Android phone and can't be sure how it'll behave on an iOS device due to the parity issues between Android and iOS apps so give…

[rontalley]

Great minds think alike!

[tmleafs]

because i dont want to add 40 bulbs to ST 12 groups is much better and no popcorn effect either

[Collisionc]

@jkp @rontalley
I already have them in a group that is controlled over cloud, why would I want to use a different smartapp to create the same groups of lights that will still ultimately run on the cloud? As tmleafs mentioned, that would mean I would need to add EVERY light to smartthings, unlike now where I only add the rooms/groups of lights.

Hue Rooms/Groups are a supported part of hue’s API - https://developers.meethue.com/documentation/core-concepts

I’m mainly wondering about smartthings adding hue group support so that it will run locally. I can already get the desired effect over the cloud.

[rontalley]

Smart Bulbs! That’s right. I keep forgetting about that. I understand now as I have many switches that have multiple bulbs on them. Yeah it would be a pitta but I guess Trend Setter still is a great option for “Grouping”

[Collisionc]

Another benefit of supporting hue’s group feature is that I don’t have to scroll through 70 lights everytime I setup a smartapp. I was tired of scrolling through 70 lights to get to “Upstairs Bedroom Switch” when attempting to automate something with webcore/smart lighting/etc.

For a while I started renaming every light as “Z Living Room 1”, “Z Bedroom 1”, etc. so that they’d be at the bottom, but that’s not a great fix. Then I saw that hue b smart supported hue groups and swapped over to that instead. Shrinking 70 lights to 8 groups is so much better from a user perspective, and “rooms” should run locally on a hub just as easily as individual lights do now.

just as a sidenote: It’s annoying how lower case letters show up below upper case letters when trying to select a device in a smartapp. I’ll scroll to the letter “K” just to realize that I named something with a lower case “k” and now I have to scroll through the 30 devices that I have “Z” in front of. At the very least it should be consistent, as the main “things” section lists “kitchen” and “Kitchen” beside each other.

[Collisionc]

Shameless bump.

[Tony_B]

Now that tfleaf’s hue_b_smart app can’t refresh or add new groups/devices/scenes, we really need to come up with something. Maybe just an update to the code, but it’s quite inexcusable at this point for SmartThings to do an update and then leave most Hue users out to dry