I was wondering if the zigbee plugin supports zigbee grouping?
Like if i add some lights to Nymea with the Zigbee plugin, and then group them together.
Will Nymea then utilize the Zigbee group messaging feature?
No, right now ZigBee groups are not used at all. Grouping things in nymea:app will just group them on an app level and send zigbee commands to all of the group members individually.
Ah, that’s unfortunate. Any plans for supporting that feature?
And on a separate note, would it be possible to import groups from a hue bridge?
No real plans so far
Given that nymea supports all kinds of devices, ZigBee groups aren’t something that can be applied generally. It would require a special grouping feature inside zigbee alone, but so far there doesn’t seem to be many use cases which would require to do so. Generic nymea grouping and/or magic should be able to cater for most of them I’d think.
I for instance, have some cases in my house where zigbee messaging helps a lot.
I don’t think most people knows of this stuff, until they can see the lights not turning on at the same time, or where one light does something, and another don’t.
If there’s enough of this friction, people will look into alternative ways to control their setups.
And given that Nymea is it’s own Zigbee gateway, this does seem like a feature worth adding.
That and rooms/zones from the Hue bridge.
Yes, I’m aware of the advantage that multiple lights in a group would turn on/off simultaneously while controlling them individually may introduce a small delay. It really shouldn’t happen that some lights don’t turn react at all though, even when addressed individually. In that case, likely the group address mode would fail as well I suppose.
Anyhow, hypothetically, thinking about “how”: What I could imagine would be some option in the zigbee settings to create a group of a certain type (i.e. light, power socket, etc…) which would then create a virtual “thing” in the system. ZigBee nodes could then be assigned to those groups from the zigbee settings as well. Dunno… just a thought…
I also have some lamps that would better be grouped as there are sometimes small delays among them. I guess in a Zigbee network that has many devices, all means to reduce the amount of communications should be looked at. If I understand this right, by using groups, there is only a group command and not several individual commands. So I be very happy to see that Zigbee Groups are possible to be created and addressed within Nymea and I like the suggested way of having a virtual type group thing.
That is correct. The amount of data sent over the network is decreased quite a bit.
If the network is busy, some commands will fail to reach it’s destination. But the main gist of this request, is to make sure we don’t get the popcorn effect when trying to control many (3+) devices at once.
That could work, or alternatively, when creating a scene, set a zigbee group ID to that scene if possible.
The problem with that is that groups don’t know anything about ZigBee. Nymea is not just a ZigBee gateway but allows to add all sorts of devices to a group/scene/rule without actually knowing anything about the underlaying technology in that place.
And that’s perfectly fine. I’m not a developer, even though I wish I could program something.
I’m not aware of the ins and outs of Nymea. I really just want to see it flourish, because I do think this is the best open source home automation project in a long while.
And given that the perfect system doesn’t exists, we can always strive to make it better.
I do believe that zigbee groups is the way forward for the Zigbee plug-in, and that you are right in grouping should be done in the settings there.