Grouping Zigbee Shades

[user1479]

I have 14 Yolax Zigbee shades. They are all paired with Hubitat and work well indivitually. I want to setup a group to manage the shades with one button. I have tried using Groups and Scenes to create a shade group of 3 Zigbee shades. When I go to shades as dimmers, the shades do not show in the listing of dimmers.

How can I operate 3 or more of these shades as a group with one command or button..

[bertabcd1234]

Room Lighting has all the functionality of Groups and Scenes, plus more, including the support for shades/blinds. That would be my suggestion. The activator device you create can be used as a single device you can use to control all three, similar to what the group device created by Groups and Scenes would do.

Besides the documentation I linked to, you may also want to check out:

How to use Room Lights for Groups

There seems to be a fair amount of confusion about how to set up a group in Room Lights. Before getting to that, let's define what a 'group' is: A group is a set of lights that should all respond identically to an activation device. By turning on the activation device, all of them should turn on. By turning it off, all should turn off. By setting it to blue, they should all be set to blue. For Room Lights to have a group, we first need to select the group member devices in the pull down for…

[user1479]

Thanks for the tip. I was trying to use Groups and Scenes. Using Room Lights did the trick.

[mluck]

Would you mind sharing your Room Lighting config that accomplishes the shade grouping? I’ve been struggling with the exact same thing. TIA.

[Johnnyvaneddie]

Just add the ones you want to group in RL

and give them a group name in the command with activator device block at the bottom right. It will create the device that controls them.

[bbrannon]

I use room lighting rules to move a couple of shades at a time with an activator. For automations with several zigbee shades I found that one or two would occasionally get skipped if I tried to move them all at once. Adding a 00:00:02 second delay between each solved that.

[hydro311]

I fully realize this makes no practical sense, but I swear zigbee blinds/shades (any brand!) are all somehow finickier than other zigbee devices...

Perhaps it has to do with their antenna positions being sometimes more blocked (depending on setup), and for some models, the antenna itself moves position up & down with the blind. Something makes them all more futzy than other devices.

I have 2 Third Reality blinds side-by-side... Whenever I have to mess with re-pairing them for some reason, I always have an initial period where they are unpredictable responding...

I've learned the hard way not to chase an instant-gratification solution like staggering the commands... If I can just put up with some wonkiness for a couple/few days, they will eventually settle in and become reliable again. Despite having numerous high-quality repeaters nearby, they are just slow to start playing well in the mesh for some reason.

That said, in my "Actions for Open / Close" rules, I do have a refresh-check that will resend the open/close command a couple times if the initial attempts didn't work. I haven't had that fallback trigger in a while now (knock on wood!)

[user1479]

Once I used the Room Lighting app as suggested by Bertabcd1234 everything worked perfectly. The step are:

• Pair your blinds.
• Add the Room Lighting app if you have not already added it
• Using Room Lights Create and Automation and select the shades you want to automate.
• Enter and name for automation in the box at the bottom of the automation screen.
• Enter Command with Activator Name in the box at the bottom of the screen.
• Click on Done.

This creates a shade device with the Activator Name in your device list. You and use that device like you would any other shade device. I am using this to control 13 shades from one device. The only thing that does not work will is stopping the shades while in motion. However the set shade position works will for partially opening the shades as a group.

I set the blinds up in the Room light app

[user1479]

Trying a new grammar checker, It butchered the last post but everyone should get the drift of the message.

[user1479]

[overanalyze]

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you @user1479 !!!! This worked just as I needed it to for some Smartwings Z-wave shades I installed for a client!!!

[user1479]

Glad it helped.