Just picked up a Smarthings hub with the the hope that we were going to be able to condense our growing collection of smart home apps into a single app. First impression is that this doesn’t appear to be the case.
I’ve done some searching for the various issues that I’ve run into but thought I’d post them in condensed format.
After creating a lighting group is there a way to hide the individual bulbs? For example I’ve created a lighting group called “Kitchen” for the 3 Hue bulbs that are over our breakfast bar. I would never turn on one of these bulbs individually.
Can you move a lighting group to the room where it belongs rather than leaving them in the group called “lighting group”?
How do you use a lighting group as a trigger for an automation?
No \ limited native support for Nest thermostats? Appears that since Google puchased Nest they have restricted access to the API
No native support for Chamberlain MyQ garage door opener?
Searching for WEMO lightswitches seems to crap out every time. It found most of my Wemo switches but does not find the Wemo Dimmers.
Looking at SmartApps to handle some of the above, but this process doesn’t seem entirely intuitive for someone that isn’t a developer.
Check the community FAQ on migrating from Wink to smartthings. I understand that may not be your situation, but it will answer a couple of your specific questions:
For Hue bulbs - install the Hue B Smart smartapp (Needs classic ST app to set up ) and you can then map entire rooms or zones to ST (but not map the individual bulbs) These can be placed in rooms (unlike lighting groups)
If you want to group lights into a single device that you can use in automations, you can create scenes for those bulbs, and use an automation to call on that scene. You can also look into Trend Setter as another way of creating a virtual device that groups together bulbs. This is the method I use.