Best way to replicate dimmer parent/child association?

[Visanth]

Hello! I'm migrating from ST, and I have a Zooz switch that I'm using purely for association. There aren't any lights physically connected to it, but I have all of the common area lights on its Group 2 and Group 4 list, so they will replicate the on/off and dim % of the Zooz when it is set. They act independently otherwise.

From perusing the forums, it appears that HE frowns upon using association and I'd like to use the best practices here. So, is there an easy way to replicate this behavior? I'd like to be able physically set it as well as via voice (Google).

[jvm33]

Try the built-in App called "Mirror". It it is simple, works well, and is quite useful.

For no obvious reason, it isn't described in the App documentation here: App Documentation - Hubitat Documentation, but it is described a bit more here: Explanation of Mirror App since no docs

I think you can also accomplish similar functions using Rule Machine 5.1, but mirror is simpler for the purpose you described.

[Visanth]

Aha! Yes that works. There's a slight delay but not too bad.

Thanks!!

[erktrek]

@Visanth

From perusing the forums, it appears that HE frowns upon using association and I'd like to use the best practices here. So, is there an easy way to replicate this behavior? I'd like to be able physically set it as well as via voice (Google).

I'm not sure this is true - there are community members who do use it successfully - @terminal3 and I were just having the conversation on another thread.

For my use-case with some hallway switches it did not work so did some other stuff...

Enbrighten zigbee switch without neutral wire (3-way wiring help needed)

It may have been how I had things set up.. not always clear the best way to handle the associations with multiple devices - I had the main switch associated with each of the 4 no load switches independently. I would get a one or two second lag sometimes and rapidly turning on/off a switch would get things really out of sync. The other switches would struggle to keep up and I could hear lots of clicking kind of a popcorn effect but for the relays.. I was able to solve this by changing the way I …

[jvm33]

@erktrek

I'm not sure this is true - there are community members who do use it successfully - @terminal3 and I were just having the conversation on another thread.

Associations are, in my experience, problematic due to inconsistent behavior when a device is controlled. The main problem I've seen is that z-wave devices don't seem to have a consistent reporting behavior by the controlled device back to the hub when a controlled device is changed using associations. For example, normally, if a device A is changed by a physical button press, it will tell the Hub it was changed. However, if device A is controlled via an association from device B, then when B then changes A, the device A may not report its new state back to the hub. This causes the hub and devices to get out of sync. This seems to differ from device-to-device. So, though associations should give faster response times, for me, it just isn't worth the efforts.

[erktrek]

That makes sense and agree given my experiences.