Controlling LED effect on a group of Blue dimmers from HA/Z2M?

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#1

I asked a similar question a couple of months ago, but now I have a better understanding of Zigbee and realize that my original question didn’t quite make sense, so…

I have some Blue dimmers in a Zigbee group and I want to tell the group to set an LED effect so that it goes to all of the dimmers at the same time. So I’ve created the group in Z2M, and there it is, with all of the dimmers and their LED effects…

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And this did create an MQTT device with that group name in Home Assistant, so I was hoping that all of the paramters shared by the devices in the group would be exposed, but all I see is an on/off switch…

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Is this a Home Assistant limitation? MQTT? Z2M? Zigbee itself? Or is there some way to do what I’m trying to do? Or am I thinking about this the wrong way?

#2

Last time I fiddled with groups I ran into this limitation, too. On/off state changes, level control, and color control are really all you get. Oh, and scenes, too. Each group does get an all_members_off state and a last_member_state to help make automations more sane, but it doesn’t help you with your desire to access the color bars. Inovelli would need to expose the LED bars as individual color bulb endpoints that could then be bound to their own group in order for you to be able to use Zigbee groups to set them simultaneously.

Edit: and to access each LED pixel individually for the purpose of group binding, each would need to have its own endpoint exposed. IMO this is doubtful… Question for you @euggersh - other than clean-looking setup / code, is there a reason why you want to do this via group messaging? Doesn’t seem likely that you’ll have a clear view of your kitchen, front porch, and bedroom switches all at once, so you probably wouldn’t notice if the LED states are set serially.

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#3

So you get level control? As you can see in my screenshot above, all I get is on/off.

#4

I get level control in z2m and Node-Red. I don’t use HA much… really the only reason I have it is so my family has a dashboard to use to open the garage door. Seems like at worst you could create a template device that encapsulates your z2m group and gives you level control, but there are HA experts lurking here that probably have more elegant (and simple) solutions.

#5

Possibly a dumb question, but how would I access those group controls directly through Z2M without HA involvement?

#6

Depends on your setup. I use Node-Red and just publish an MQTT command to group_name/set with the appropriate payload. I can look tonight when I get home and post an example. In HA you can do this too, and I have an example I can dig out for that (I think).

#7

That would be awesome. Thank you!

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#8

For Node-Red communication, it’s as simple as sending a JSON payload of

{“brightness”:76}

to the topic zigbee2mqtt/group_name/set

I don’t have a direct example in HA for setting brightness or color, but I can show you how I recall a z2m scene. I set up picture cards on a dashboard, one card per scene, and configure it for direct service call to MQTT Publish, like this:

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Should be the same for color and brightness - just change the payload to a brightness or color command. Hope this helps…

Edit: If you don’t know the topic you should be publishing to, go grab a copy of MQTT Explorer. Super helpful tool.

#9

I created a blueprint script for HA that can call multiple switches simultaneously. However, I’m not sure if it will work on Z2M groups as I haven’t tried it.

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