previously on mark watt tech the second feature i'd like to see added in 2022
is the ability to create groups the ability to create groups
groups groups groups groups groups using the user interface
what's going on guys i hope you're all doing well so creating groups using the user interface is now
finally possible and if you happen to be watching this video close to the time that it went out then
this feature is currently only accessible through the beta but it will be a full-fledged feature in
update 2022.4 and if you happen to be from the future watching the video then let me know what
you think of groups ui in the comments below and just to note that this is currently in beta so it
is subject to change and this could all be totally different by the time that the full release comes
out but if it is different then i'll probably be covering that in another video anyway because this
feature is wicked prior to update 2022.4 the only way to make use of groups was to set them up and
create them directly through yaml but for newer users or people that don't really like to dabble
with yaml this may have been a bit off-putting and they may have been a bit unsure of what to
do and this could have led to them potentially missing out on a very powerful and very useful
feature but miss out no more you'll now be able to create your groups directly through the user
interface without having to mess around with any config or to write any yaml so let's jump straight
into this and find out exactly what groups are and how we go about using them to create a group
you've got two different routes that you can go down in order to get into the group creation menu
and i guess it all kind of depends on how your home assistant brain's wired up so let's have
a look at those two methods now the first one would be to go into devices and services from
here you can choose add integration in the bottom right then if you simply start typing group you'll
see that the option comes up for group helper so you could just select that here and once you
select that it will pop up a little confirmation box asking you if you want to set up a group and
from here you could just choose okay the second option would be to directly go to the helpers
which is where groups are located and you do this by going into automations and scenes then along
the top you want to choose helpers and then in the bottom right corner you want to press add helper
in this pop-up for helper you'll now notice that there's lots of different helpers that you can
make use of but for now we're just concentrating on group so in the menu here i can see group
so i'm just going to select that you'll then be presented with a list of all the various
different group types that you can make use of at the time of recording this there's currently seven
different group types available a group allows you to create a brand new entity and that entity
represents multiple different entities all of the same type a great example of a group is a
chandelier you might have a chandelier in your front room that's got multiple different smart
bulbs in and rather than having to address each bulb manually you can just create a group that
will then use one entity in order to control all three of those separate bulbs using our chandelier
example we could then control this new chandelier group entity and any change that we made to this
new entity like turning the power on and off changing the color or the temperature that
would then reflect on each of the bulbs that are in the chandelier make sense well if it doesn't
then don't worry because we're actually going to just carry on rolling with the chandelier example
let's do that now with creating a light group to create our group we're going to need to set the
base type so in our example of the chandelier the chandelier is going to be a light group
so in the list here we're just going to select light group after we do that we just need to
give the group a name and then we can assign any members to the group so go ahead and give your
group a name and then start adding members to it if you select the entity drop down here it's going
to present you with a list of all the entities that are compatible with the group type that you
selected in my case here it showed me all of the different light entities that are available in my
home assistant instance so i'm just going to pick a couple that are available here in my demo unit
once you're happy with your member selection you'll have two options you'll have the option
for hide members and you'll also have submit for now we're just going to go ahead and click submit
and we can see that we successfully created our group for chandelier in our helper list we can
now see our new group entity for the chandelier and if we select this we can see all of the normal
options that you'd get for an entity like setting the name setting the icon setting the entity id
and also the area but you'll now notice that we have this new option for configuring this date
but before we have a look at configuring the state let's just quickly have a look at the controls
that we have available for our new group entity so in the top right there we're going to just select
controls and from here we can see that we've got the chandelier and we've got an option for turning
it on and off and also the brightness and that's just because this is a group for light so let's
turn that on and obviously you can't see this but all of the lights that are in that group have now
turned on and from here i could then adjust the brightness and this is going to affect all the
options that are in that group and again i can change the color and also the temperature here
let's just turn that off and we're going to head back and have a look at setting the state
back in the settings then if we choose the option to configure state that will take us into another
options menu and in this menu we can adjust and modify any of the members that are currently
assigned to the group so we could remove them or we could change them for other ones or if you
wanted to you could also add more in there's also a toggle switch for hiding members and a toggle
for all entities the hider members toggle does exactly that it will hide away any of the entities
for any of the members that you've currently got listed in the group and this can be useful if
you want to just tidy up the ui a bit or if you never want to represent that group as anything
else other than the new entity and you never want to reference it by the individual ones we've then
got this handy toggle for all entities and what this one allows us to do is to set the group state
based on whether one or all of its members are currently turned on by default this is turned off
and the default behavior allows the group to turn on if any of its members get turned on and if you
set this all entities to be on all of the members of the group have to be turned on in order for the
group state to change so we've now got this super convenient way of creating a brand new entity that
represents and controls a bunch of entities of the same type and as it is an entity you can make use
of it as you normally would in your scene scripts and automations and there we go guys that's been
a quick look at the new method for setting up and creating groups using the user interface
i personally would have liked it if groups had its own section next to helpers up at the top there
was a dedicated area for actually creating and viewing any of your groups but that's just me if
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