MainUI - representing several Hue lights as one light

While I mostly try to have everything Alexa-controllable, the outage last night pointed out that I should really surface more controls to my family from the smartphone and a wall-mounted tablet.

with the new MainUI and the model it uses to dynamically build user interfaces, what is the best way to group 3 to 6 Hue lights as one ‘Light’? If I build a group, and navigate to the room, I need to control all six hue’s individually. I’d like to set it so it doesn’t ‘drill down’ into the individual lights.

I know I could build a virtual/proxy item and control it with a rule, but I’m wondering if there is a cleaner way to do this.

There are a few options, most of which take advantage of the fact that when you send a command to a Group it will command all the members of that Group.

  1. Tag the Group with Point/Property tags. And command sent to the Group will be sent to the members of the Group. From the Model’s perspective the Group will be a Point, not an Equipment, and therefore it won’t open up to show its members.

  2. Override the default list widget for the Group so it provides a widget that lets you control it and therefore all it’s members.

  3. If that causes the lights to be commanded too fast which can result in some commands being lost (a problem with Hue I think), your proxy Item with a rule will be required so you can insert a delay between the commands.

Awesome, Rich.

#1 is almost perfect, except once something is a point and not equipment, it moves from the Equipment to the Properties tab in the popup. Not a big deal for me, but might be confusing to others if not used frequently.

#2 - gonna see if I can figure it out.

#3 - hopefully the timing isn’t an issue because I’m trying to stay away from this scenario, but at least I know how to do it.

The big problem for me is the ‘set it and forget it’ scenario - when things don’t work and I haven’t touched it in months I can’t remember how everything is tied together.