Grouping Smart Home Devices

It is very common to group devices together so that they can be controlled as a unit.

For example you may want a single switch to control all lights in a room.

the mos common grouping strategies are

Generally by function/device type and by zone/room are the most common.

As an example you may want to group the lights in each room so that they can be activated at the same time.

It doesn’t usually make sense grouping the room fans with the room lights.

There are two ways of accomplishing this depending on the networking protocols and devices you are using, and they are:

The Zigbee networking protocol lets you group Zigbee devices together.

Devices flashed with the Tasmota firmware can also be grouped together.

Other networking/device protocols may also support grouping.

If you have a network of Zigbee devices only then using Zigbee groups may be OK.

This grouping tends to be more efficient as the groups are addressed as a single unit.

So 1 group command – 1 network command/message.

However this type of grouping can be very difficult to manage as you need to query the device to know the group membership.

Using the control application to group devices together is much easier to implement and manage especially in mixed networks.

In this configuration when a message/command is sent to a group it is sent to each device individually.

So if there are 10 members in a group then 10 commands/messages are sent when sending a group message.

However in this configuration you know the membership of a group without needing to query the network devices.

In addition it works even if the device protocol doesn’t support grouping.

Related tutorials and resources:

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