If you have several devices of the same type, and want to be able to control them all together, then it’s possible to group them together in Home Assistant. The integration is simply called ‘Group‘, and once configured, it creates a helper entity that will perform the same action on all grouped devices.
Last year, I picked up two Zigbee colour-changing LED strips from AliExpress. One was to go in our nine-year-old’s bedroom and the other in the living room – the idea being that we could set the colours depending on the time of year. Rather than having Christmas lights that we put up in December, and took down in January, these lights could stay up all year round. For example, they could be pink around Valentines Day, or green at Halloween.
That was the theory. However, despite ordering 3 metre long strips, they were too short. Our house is about 100 years old with tall ceilings, and consequently, tall windows. In the end, two LED strips together, totalling 6 metres, were long enough just for one window and so they’re both in our nine-year-old’s bedroom. Because they’re two separate strips, they appear and work as separate Zigbee devices.
Creating a group in Home Assistant
You can start the process of creating a group either on the Integrations or Helper screens of Home Assistant’s settings. First of all, Home Assistant will ask you what type of devices you are grouping – all the devices must be of the same type, so you can’t group a switch and a light together.
Well, actually you can – but first you need to create a ‘Change Device Type of a Switch’ helper. Say you have a smart plug controlling a light; you can then create a Helper that appears as a Light, and then that can be grouped with other lights.
Anyway, in my example, I selected Light, gave it a name, and then selected the entities that needed to belong to the group – i.e. the individual lights. There’s also a ‘Hide Members’ option, which will hide the devices you’ve selected from the list of entities in Home Assistant. If you’ll only ever want to interact with the lights as a group, then tick this. However, if you still want to be able to manage individual lights as well, then keep it unticked.
On my Home Assistant dashboard, the icon shows that the new group helper is for multiple lights. The good news is that, even with colour changing lights, all the lights in the group will respond the same way together once grouped.
I also make these lights available in Apple Home and Google Home, and again, I make sure that Home Assistant is exposing the group, rather than the individual lights. As such, when I use Google Assistant to turn them on and change the colour, both lights change simultaneously.