I am using Blue 2-1 switches that are on firmware 2.15 and Home Assistant version 2023.8.4. I created a Zigbee group of 3 Hue lights that are paired to Home Assistant with a Sonoff 3. I then directly bound a blue 2-1 switch to this group. The switch is in smart bulb mode and dimmer mode.
Operating the lights from the switch works great. However, if I update the group of lights from Home Assistant, the switch LEDs do not reflect the state of the lights (for example, the LEDs will look like the light is on when the lights are actually off).
I’ve found a couple old posts for this, and the best I can guess is that when I bound my 2-1 switch to my group, I selected LevelControl and Onoff, but endpoint 2. There was no endpoint 1 for LevelControl and OnOff. One old thread referenced this issue but it sounded like an issue of old firmware or old Home Assistant versions. Yet, I am on the latest for both.
Maybe I need to add my switches to the zigbee group? Rather than binding the switches to each other and each switch to the zigbee group of lights, I found in the ZHA setup guide an instruction that suggested the following:
zigbee group 1: switch A, and all the bulbs
zigbee group 2: switch B, and all the bulbs
bind switch B to group 1, and bind switch A to group 2
I tried this, but it only kind of works. When I turn on zigbee group 1 in Home Assistant, the lights go out, switch A LED turns off, and Home Assistant reports group 2 as turned off. But switch B LED stays on.
Should I put all lights and switches in the same group? What am I misunderstanding here?
You’ll need 3 discreet ZigBee groups + bindings to make this work like you want:
1 & 2: the ZigBee groups described in your post with those exact bindings. These are used for physical switch presses only and are never called from HA.
3: a 3rd ZigBee group of all lights and BOTH switches, which you reference at the end of your post. This is the one that your HA automations will use. Nothing is bound to this group.
Convoluted at first glance, but it does all make sense.
Edit: unless, maybe, you can now just do the #3 approach for BOTH physical and HA automations? Not sure, but I know I set my 3-ways up with 3 groups for a reason at the time
The #3 approach is what I do with all of mine. I’m not seeing why you’d need 2 other groups… I’m curious what situation you ran into that needed that setup.
Good q. I honestly don’t remember, but I am 100%, mostly, vaguely sure I had a very good reason for it. I may experiment tomorrow to see if it’s unnecessary. Firmware 1.00 was pretty brutal for ZigBee group binding so it may have been something there that made me go that route.
It’s working ok for me to have everything in one big group, but maybe the reasoning it would be suggested to set it up with all of these groups would be because if I press a button on a switch with just one group, is that it’s sending the command to itself as part of the group.
I’m not noticing side effects from this, maybe the switch is smart enough to know that it sent the command? If not, I could see it occasionally doing something weird. It would definitely be easier not to create so many groups…
It seems like, if you want to control your lights through home assistant or home kit, you always want to create a group that includes all of the connected switches to the relevant lights, otherwise the leds will never sync. Is that right? It’s not documented in any of the instructions I found for 3 way switches (with 2 smart bulbs, where it suggests just binding the switches together), or anything else.
You could control the switches directly via home assistant, but then you lose the ability to set any custom colors or anything that aren’t being set via the switch
That’s my understanding and why I set it up the way I did. I didn’t get any blue switches until 2.08 though so maybe there were some issues if the switch was commanding itself but I’ve seen no problems with 5 switches in a group with a few smart bulbs.
The official HowTo for Zigbee binding in this forum doesn’t seem to recommend this approach, but it seems that it’s needed even if you have just one switch and one light, otherwise how will the switch know you turned the light off in home assistant? I suppose it’s not needed if you will only ever press the switches physically, or control the lights in home assistant through the switches only.
Would there be a way to tell if there’s a problem with just combining multiples switches and lights in one big group? It makes me hesitant given that the original instructions were to have the switches in separate groups sending instructions only to the other groups that they weren’t a part of.
