I know, this has been asked many times before and will probably be asked many times in the future until SmartThings finally natively supports grouping similar devices.
As of today, what’s the best way to accomplish this? I have 4 smart bulbs in my bedroom, 99% of the time I use my Amazon Echo to control them, however, with other things, like 3rd party apps like IFTTT, SharpTools, SmartTiles (until they’re next release which I think includes grouping), etc…Grouping would make life easier.
Previously, I use to use Dim with Me and a basic virtual dimmer, but it just didn’t always work perfectly well…not sure why, could be a number of things…the smart app, the virtual dimmer device type code or my custom device type code for my bulbs.
I tried using Rule Machine, but was more complicated than I wanted to deal with. Is Dim With Me still the best app to use? I stopped using it like 7 months ago, so maybe it’s better now. Or maybe it was my virtual dimmer / custom bulb device type code.
The official feature, smart lighting, does a good job of grouping on/off lights together. It’s the only one that will run locally at the time of this writing.
However, it doesn’t handle dimmers or color changes. You have to go to community – created code for that.
Dim with me and dim and dimmer are both good for lights which are not RGBW. If you need color controls there’s another smartapp that’s very good for Hues and one that works very well with Osram. And several community members have created their own variations for specific kinds of features. You can use the quick browse list in the community-created wiki and check the list for lighting to find these.
Trendsetter is one of the newer smart apps that handles devices other than lights as well, like power meters, and is worth looking at. It will also show up on the quick browse list for lighting.
Awesome, thanks guys. Since you both brought up Trend Setter, I’ll take a look at that.
That Smart Zone motion sensor thing sounds really cool, I’ll take a look, even though I only have one motion sensor for now. Maybe it’s something that will inspire me to buy more!!
And as far as Alexa goes, she’s okay, as she supports grouping in her app, you can create multiple groups with the same devices in each group if you want to use different names, etc (example, bedroom lights, upstairs lights, everything).
I don’t need color for now, I have all my Osram bulbs hard coded to a specific white temperature and I only have one LIFX bulb, so I should be okay there thankfully.