I am in the process of migrating my lights from the Ikea gateway to decons.
So far so good. But now I have run into a problem.
I have a group of 11 GU10 spots I want to add as a single item in Openhab.
But i cannot find anywhere how to add a hue group to openhab.
I know I can add all the lights to openhab and create a group there. But I really want deconz to multicast the command so every light turns on at once an keep the zigbee traffic to a minimum.
I have looked at the hue binding source and have found code handling access to REST url /groups and even /scenes but not how I should add it to my .things file
I am running 2.5.0.M2
Would also love to have support for deCONZ Groups.
Seems it us not supported in OH.
In Home Assistent this should work with deCONZ.
I am moving Osram Lightify and Ikea Tradfri away from their native gateways
OSRAM is not reliable and Tradfri I had to setup from scratch becouse a gateway died and there is no possibility for backup, not on Osram.
Till now I am impressed about deCONT (with RaspBee)
Unfortunately the Hue Binding does not support groups at the moment (see https://github.com/eclipse/smarthome/issues/2877). I tried to look into it more than once but for me it does not have priority and time is limited . If we can find someone to volunteer for implementation (@m17design???) I will support him/her with all my knowledge about the Hue API and deCONZ API - which claims to emulate the Hue API with all its features.
Yes time is always a problem.
I really hope we get groups support as it is really a must have if you have multiple lights in a room.
This really also applies to the other Zigbee light bindings (Ikea and Zigbee)
Until we get native support in the Hue (or Deconz) binding i have made a temporary solution talking directly to the API from a rule and dimmer
rule "Værksted brightness group dimmer get value"
when Item Vaerksted_Brightness received update
then
Vaerksted_Brightness_Group.postUpdate(Vaerksted_Brightness.state)
end
rule "Værksted brightness group dimmer"
when Item Vaerksted_Brightness_Group received command
then
val String MY_URL = 'http://192.168.2.1/api/5B31C73D70/groups/3/action'
val Number bri = (receivedCommand as PercentType) * 255 / 100
val on = if(receivedCommand == 0) "false" else "true"
var String myData = '{
"on": ' + on + '
"bri": ' + bri.toString + '
}'
sendHttpPutRequest(MY_URL, "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", myData)
end
Just replace the IP, API key and group number with your own.
Unfortunately there is no real concept of groups in openhab that works at the binding level. The binding only knows about channels - it doesn’t know about items, or the groups that items are placed in.
I really think that OH needs such a concept as I’ve also been fighting with this for both the ZigBee and ZWave bindings. I have some ideas on how I could bodge something in the ZigBee binding, but really the binding needs to know the following -:
When a group is created - and some way to say it is a “physical” group linked to a binding
When an item is added, or removed from a group
When the group value is changed
This probably needs an extension to the API, and probably requires quite a bit of thought to implement.