Group of devices works great, but scene does not

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1

Hey folks - brand new hubitat user here (coming from smartthings). Apologies if this is a blatantly obvious issue. :slight_smile:

So my master bedroom has a total of 9 recessed lights (each with a smart bulb) and two lights outside the patio door. I have them set up as a group, and that works fantastic. Controlling them through the group works absolutely perfectly.

The problem comes when I try to control them using a scene. I have a scene set up called "master off" that just turns all the lights in the room off. If I activate the scene (directly through the UI, or via Alexa, or via a button action), it pretty consistently will fail to turn off at least two of them. Similarly, I have a scene called "Master Normal" (set the master bedroom to a "normal" on state) that suffers from the same issue - it (more often than not) will not get all of the lights activated.

Here's an example of the logs from a failed "master off" run - I was hoping somebody might have an idea of what's going on? (links removed because it wouldn't accept them)

[dev:33] 2020-11-19 22:51:43.733 [debug] parse description: catchall: 0104 0006 01 01 0040 00 0B44 00 00 0000 0B 01 0000

[dev:33] 2020-11-19 22:51:43.687 [debug] parse description: catchall: 0104 0006 01 01 0040 00 0B44 00 00 0000 0B 01 0000

[dev:37] 2020-11-19 22:51:42.393 [info] Master Bank 1 Light 2 was turned off

[dev:33] 2020-11-19 22:51:42.322 [debug] parse description: catchall: 0104 0006 01 01 0040 00 0B44 00 00 0000 0B 01 0000

[dev:40] 2020-11-19 22:51:41.782 [info] Master Bank 3 Light 2 was turned off

[dev:33] 2020-11-19 22:51:41.750 [info] Master Patio 2 is off

[dev:33] 2020-11-19 22:51:41.745 [debug] evt- rawValue:0, value: off, descT: Master Patio 2 is off

[dev:33] 2020-11-19 22:51:41.715 [debug] parse description: read attr - raw: 0B440100060A00001000, dni: 0B44, endpoint: 01, cluster: 0006, size: 0A, attrId: 0000, encoding: 10, command: 01, value: 00

[dev:35] 2020-11-19 22:51:41.677 [info] Master Bank 1 Light 1 was turned off

[dev:33] 2020-11-19 22:51:40.772 [debug] parse description: catchall: 0104 0006 01 01 0040 00 0B44 00 00 0000 0B 01 0000

[dev:112] 2020-11-19 22:51:40.393 [info] Master Off was turned on

2

I gather you added all of the bulbs individually to the scene and not the group?

3

Correct. Truthfully, I hadn't thought to do that (groups is a new concept for me, coming from smartthings, and I'm still wrapping my head around it a little bit). I'll definitely give that a try, but I be able to do what I'm trying to do and expect it to work, yes?

4

It should work. ZigBee has the ability to send out one message to all members of the group rather than individual messages so should not cause some lights to be missed.

5

The challenge I have is that several of the scenes I have in mind have different settings for different lights. To my knowledge, that's not something I can do with a group, right?

I've been setting up some groups and it largely works great, but there's no reason I shouldn't be able to set up a scene that sets lots of different lights in different ways, as long as I'm willing to accept the "popcorn style update" - yes?

6

Yeah you'll have to put up with the popcorn effect then.

You can always try and make smaller groups and use these in the scenes.

7

This is what I'm trying to solve though - why did my original scene not work?

8

It didn't work most likely due to too many messages being sent at once and they got lost in the mesh.

9

Ok - so this is just a limitation of zigbee communication? I ask because this used to work mostly ok with smartthings. To be clear, I have the majority of things working now by creating groups, but it would be good for me to understand the limitation. (And thank you for making the effort to explain this)