Light groups with scenes

[gusty bay]

I'm running into what I think is proibably a limitation of lighting groups, but I wanted to check.

I have some Hue lights. I have them all in a Light Group in HA. I have a scene, where I've set said light group as the (sole) entity, and set all the lights to the various colors and brightness that I want them. When I save, and then re-activate the scene, all the lights come back on, with every light at the same brightness and the same color. Is this because the Scene is seeing the Light Group entity as a "single" entity and cannot separate out all the different states in the group?

[grim totem]

dont use a light group
use a scene with multiple bulbs in it

[gusty bay]

So, just manually add them all one at a time?

What then, is the point of a light group?

[grim totem]

a group of bulbs is seen as 1 bulb so when you save it it only saves 1 bulb worth of data which is all it has to restore

[gusty bay]

So it's like...if you want everything to be the same.

[grim totem]

a group is for "i have a bunch of bulbs that i want to act as 1 big light"

[gusty bay]

Ah

Is there some way to create an entity / helper / something where it saves discrete states of all entities in the group?

[grim totem]

the way home assistant uses "group" is different to what other systems use the term for

[gusty bay]

Those are always the most fun problems to try and search up solutions for. Hence my presence here 😄

[grim totem]

if you want bulbs to be different colours then you just add them all to a scene

a scene stores all settings of all the devices added to it

[gusty bay]

That's most unfortunate, but it's what I suspected.

Thanks for confirming all that for me.

[grim totem]

scenes are really powerful and can be multiple device types.
e.g. light on and garage door open

[gusty bay]

Some sort of way to auto-populate all those devices (there's like 40 in the scene I want to make) would be nice

[grim totem]

i am affraid not (that i know of anyway) but you only have to do it once i suppose

[gusty bay]

True

It's especially annoying because unless light groups, it doesn't remove the device after it's entered, it keeps it there and just silently fails if you click it again.