I have three Homematic-IP dimmer (HmIP-BDT and HmIP-PDT) in openHAB 3.01 (openHABian 1.6.3, Raspi 2) working perfectly well individually and in an “Alexa-Group” with Alexa. However, grouping them in an “openHAB-group” and controlling this one group does not work at all.
Here’s what I tried and what doesn’t work for multiple reasons:
Creating a group and adding the three lights as Direct Group Members
Edit: The “0%-problem” appears to be covered here ([SOLVED]Struggle with Rollershutter HMIP-BROLL) as well for the rollershutter, but I’m still having problems applying this to my setting.
Your question guided me in finding the answer / solving the problem myself: Turned out the Type appeared to be correct already (“Group”), but it was the Members Base Type which i forgot to set (now “Dimmer”, which also sounds logical, so I could’ve found this out myself in the first place ;).
What I also found out: The aggregation function can lead to some pretty funny behavior with three dimmer, when set to “AVG” (–> leading to an endless loop of the lights powering up and down ;).
You could also use group feature from alexa if you don’t need them in OH. This won’t solve the grouping issues you’ve seen but it may be a solution for someone who don’t need them in OH.
Add all lights which should be controlle in that room to one group.
Group name: “living room”
“Alexa, turn of the living room lights”
“Alexa, set living room lights to 30 percent”
“Alexa, living room lights 30 percent”
You can still say something like:
“Alexa, turn off the couch light”
“Alexa, couch light 30 percent”
Thanks. I had it work that way before, and it worked perfectly well. Though I try to build things in a way to have the least amount of “logic” in Alexa, since I’m considering switching to another voice-controlled system in the near future.