Newb Questions: Lighting Groups: Hubitat vs. Alexa, Dashboard adding devices later

Hi All -

Well on my way to migrating everything over from SmartThings to Hubitat. It's been a deep dive and a lot of hours to migrate, but I'm getting close.

A couple of newbie questions:

  • I've added some new dimmer switches and I'd like to add them to some of my dashboards... how do you "authorize" new devices to pre-existing dashboards?
  • I'm not sure whether to set up Alexa lighting groups in addition to, or instead of, Hubitat lighting groups... what are the pros/cons? I guess I'd mostly like voice control to work for something like "Alexa, turn off downstairs lights." And I'd like to avoid confusion over multiple identically named lighting groups.
  • How do you make dashboards pretty for mobile access? I'm creating dashboards that just have 2 columns to display on my phone, but even then, they're too wide to fit vertically on my Pixel 3 phone.

I can't speak to the dashboard questions as I don't use them, but Alexa groups I use extensively. What I do is add my HE groups to Alexa groups. Why? Because Alexa groups also contain both default Echos and speakers (if you have Sonos speakers or other speakers compatible with Alexa). This is how you get Alexa to respond properly to "turn off the lights" just in the room you are in (or in another room) and also "play music" and have it default to an external speaker as opposed to the Echo itself.

If you click the cog wheel in the upper right and select options. If you change your height and width to dashboard1

You should be able to fit 3 wide to view on a phone, and 5 wide for a tablet (roughly) you may need to adjust this minimally.

You can also just leave these fields blank and they will auto-size to fit, meaning all cells in your specified number of rows and columns will automatically and equally shrink/expand to take up your entire screen (this what most dashboard-type apps I've seen do by default, so Hubitat is a bit odd here, but I guess there's no reason to prefer one over the other--and you get the option here which I'm not sure many others provide).

This is what I do on most of my dashboards; that way, they are usable on at least a few different screen sizes (something designed for a tablet is still probably not going to look very good on a phone; I suppose if you disable this, you'd get some usability in the form of scrolling). Not saying it's the best way, but I prefer mine this way--whatever works for you!

The settings I posted I use that looks fine on a phone, a tablet, or a 49'' TV. It's all about priority placement of your tiles to be easier accessible for each device.