Lighting Group Creation

SmartApps & Automations
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I’ve been on a quest over the last few months to find a smart app, or code that will allow me to simply group lights together.

For instance, I have 12 lights in my kitchen. When creating a new routine, instead of choosing the 12 light check boxes, I would like to choose the 1 Kitchen group to which they have been assigned.

My setup severely suffers from the pop corn effect (lights turning on in sequence, but missing a few in the process). I notice that with Alexa when I ask her to turn on my kitchen, all lights turn on at the same time with 100% accuracy. When my motion detector triggers an event that is supposed to turn on lights, it will miss a few. I’m hoping that getting lights in groups will get them to turn on at the same time like Alexa, rather than one by one.

I’ve tried code from GitHub and a few other sources, but this seems too complicated. I have been using an a Smart App in Smartthings called Gentle Wake Up which does group lights such that they all operate together. But I was hoping to find something similar to this, but more stripped down such that it only contains the lights. All other functionality of the light groups would be controlled by the routine itself.

Hope that makes some sort of sense. With any luck, maybe I’ll find a fix for this.

Many thanks!

-Phil

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There’s a how to article in the community – created wiki on grouping lights that might help:

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

As far as the popcorn effect, it depends on the specific devices being used. What’s the brand and model of the lights?

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You are making lots of sence. But here is my take on this.
You should uses an app which you can get from GitHub called DimWithMe. You can have a group of lights turn on/off in relation to a single light bulb or switch. If you need the link to the code, I will find it.

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Great advice guys, I’ll be checking into this over the next few days.

I’ll update for the results

Thanks!

-Phil

ps. I’m using Philips Hue bulbs :slight_smile:

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If the hue bulbs are connected to the hue bridge, then unfortunately there’s no way at The present time to avoid a popcorn effect through the official SmartThings integration. Discussion in the following thread:

What you can do is use IFTTT to activate a hue scene. Using that route, the Hue bridge will groupcast the instruction to all the lights in the scene, which usually remove the popcorn effect. However, there may be some slight additional lag added at the front end because of the IFTTT piece. So that will work for some use cases but not others.

At the present time there’s no way to activate a Hue scene directly from SmartThings, although @ady624 Has said it may be introduced in future versions of webcore.

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Hi JD,

Thanks for the input. I was afraid someone was going to say that. :slight_smile:

I’ll be on the lookout for future updates. I’m sure in time this feature will be included.

Thanks again!

-Phil

1 Like