When will smartthings lighting groups switch to Zigbee Grouping with broadcast messages?
Note that when sending messages in broadcast, the “popcorn” effect does not occur, as all lamps receive the messages simultaneously. This has already been implemented in hubitat…
From the beginning, SmartThings has had a design philosophy that said they were not going to offer options in the app which applied to only one protocol. They believed it would be confusing for their users, and that users should not have to know whether a device was Zigbee or Z wave in order to successfully use it in a SmartThings routine.
Consequently, the app does not provide support for things like zwave central scenes, zwave direct association, Zigbee binding, or Zigbee groups.
You can typically get to them by writing a custom edge driver which implements the necessary messaging in raw form, but it just isn’t part of the official UI philosophy. Here’s one example of that:
Zigbee Button + Groups - Alpha Test
So… although I haven’t seen anything officially, my own guess about this is that it will never be provided as something you can just do easily through the official features in the app.
But it is already available to those who write custom edge drivers, and there are some which do allow for Zigbee groups.
To the SmartThings UI designers, though, a group isn’t a group unless it can include both zwave and Zigbee lights.
see also the remarkable work that Mariano has done to implement many Zigbee features, including power restore settings and group bindings, which are not exposed through standard routines. So the features are available to you on the SmartThings platform, they just aren’t exposed in the SmartThings app official options.
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And here’s a how-to from one Zigbee switch manufacturer on how to use Zigbee groups with their devices on a SmartThings platform. Note that they are making use of Mariano’s custom edge driver in their process.
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I use Mariano’s drive, which reduces the data sent to the devices. However, the lamps still don’t turn on all at the same time.
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