I know how it works, I’m just saying it’s unintuitive. It’s not how any other smart home system works.

I use adaptive brightness too, actually. But nearly every time I’m manually adjusting a room’s existing brightness, I don’t want every single unpowered devices to turn on, too.

99% of the time I want to adjust the current lighting, I don’t want to first turn on all lights and then adjust all of those lights to a uniform standard before individually toggling them all individually. Powering on all unpowered lights when adjusting brightness should be the edge case, IMO (also again not just my opinion, but the industry standard)

For the record all other smart home systems treat room groups the way I am describing (like a dimmer knob and power switches). But there isn’t even an option in HA for rooms to “only adjust devices currently in use”. The smart home companies seem to have researched how people naturally intuit such things.

I would expect it to behave like all other smart home systems, or like a physical dimmer switch/power switch.

The fact that dimming a room turns ON all the lights in the room is actually wild

right lol

This one broke zigbee2mqtt for me but I’m not sure why. I rolled back for now.

I also just want to add the batteries in most of those zigbee buttons last on the order of years

Yeah that’s probably the simplest way!

Helpful! Thank you I will look into it.

If they don’t have power, they drop from the network or mesh.

That’s the problem, they don’t drop, the entity remains in a zombie state. Is there really no way to test if a device is still connected or not?

EDIT: Or just manually set an entity to “off”?

This is it exactly.

“But how can we know if it’s a bot?”

We probably can’t based on a single comment or post, which is why rules need to be constructed around maintaining a level of effort and quality.

The right tool for the right job… LLMs can’t do a lot, and can make a lot of things worse when misapplied, but that doesn’t mean the technology is wholly useless.

This only applies if you use their bridge and the bridge is connected to the internet. If you do what I said in my comment (zigbee2mqtt addon with dongle) then there is no path for them to collect. The Zigbee2Mqtt addon allows for firmware updates.

I found that Phillips Hue bulbs works great with the Zigbee2Mqtt addon (and poorly/not at all with ZHA integration) and the $25 Sonoff dongle. Home Assistant sells their own dongle which I would imagine works even better too.

Hue bulbs are more expensive than most, but people seem to say they have the best color consistency.

If you want to stick with Wifi you could probably just hook up Tasmota plugs to your existing lamps.

Ah I missed that. That’s great! I should look into it.

So the automation is triggered if the power draw is above a certain amount? I assume there is a smart plug? Or is it a dishwasher with Wifi? Forgive me still learning how these things work.

If you can figure out a better way please let me know 😭😭

How would you do presence detection (getting home)

I have a sensor on my front door that triggers an automation that sends a text to everyone’s phones that is (supposed to) trigger a location update. It then waits ten seconds and checks everyone’s phones to see what wifi network they are connected to, it then waits another ten seconds and if nobody’s location is “home”, or nobody’s wifi is the home network, then it texts everyone an alert of a possible break in.

Only about 50% of the time does it correctly identify someone legitimately coming home lol

Wasn’t a fan of their hub so I connect the bulbs directly to my ZigBee hub/dongle.

I did the same, I wish it was more widely known that it was possible (and very easy with Zigbee2Mqtt).

I just checked and it’s in the HACS docs