Hi Blynk team,
I will be ice idea to have the possibility with Device Selector to be able to select a tag.
(Especialy to my project to control a group of items for exemple 1st floor light)
Best regards
1 Like
Hello. Could you please explain a bit more. Maybe some use case?
Nice idea!
@Dmitriy, use case:
Button is attached to a tag + pin
User selects tag in device selector
When button is pressed, all tagged devices turn on/off smth
Doesn’t make any sense to me. You can just assign button to tag.
With this function, the user will be able to control any device separately or group of devices at choice without adding new button on the interface.
For exemple if you controle a switch your could turn off a selected light or decide to turn off all the light of the floor or of the complete house.
You are not able to know in advance how the user will make his groups. The number of possibilities is infinite.
The possibility to use Selector to select tag meet completely this need with the possibility to defined the tag by enduser.
regards,
I too came across such a requirement. @Dmitriy : here is a clear example u asked for.
My house has 3 rooms, each with 3 conventional switch boards. All the rooms have a fairly similar electrical layout. Now i plan to automate/control them with Blynk.
I would wish to use an esp12-E for each switchboard. So I would end up using 9 esp12-Es divided into 3 rooms/tags. My app would have a device selector that would be capable of selecting tags, buttons that correspond to switches and sliders that correspond to fan speed regulators.
Now that would work as intended. But there is another way of doing it. Giving all controllers the same auth token, using a menu and program accordingly. But what if I would want home screen buttons for switches that I would go for often when I enter rooms( like the light buttons). I can’t guess or change the active menu item on the app frequently when i are running out of time and am searching for my car’s key.with separate auth tokens for controllers I’ll make a quick control panel of buttons and add them to the home screen.
I have already finished the software side of the project and have implemented it in one of the rooms and is being tested. Using Bridge adds a lot of data traffic than esp could handle and it often disconnects due to data flood error.
@Arvind_Ravichandran @Alex78780 thanks. Now it’s clear. Yeap, make sense. I’ll check what we can do here.
1 Like
Hi There
Do you have an idea of when this tag selection will be possible?
I also have a project with 20 devices. I need to group 5 of them together and then switch between 4 groups of 5
Kind Regards
Hi. We will not implement this for now. As this is very complex feature for no benefits.
Hi Dmitriy,
Made an account specially to reply on this one.
Blynk has been great and helped me a lot with my iot projects.
But the function asked here would be one of the best functions imo.
In my particular setup I have multiple (20 ish devices) rgb led lights, all over the house, multiple per room.
these would be grouped in logical “tags” (object/room/floor/inside/outside/all)
In the selector these tags would be, offcourse, visible.
With the buttons, the lights can then be turned off/on, a color can be chosen, a pattern can be started,…
you also could apply the above to automate blinds, sockets, switches,… around the house/building…
Pardon my “brutality” but I don’t understand why you think this has no benefits.
As I see it this has huge benefits and could lure even more people to Blynk
With this function and my first example you could have a Philips hue, but without a bridge.
Now I’m forced to build a bridge. Not checked if it would be possible, but as i have it in my head now it would require a raspberry pi running node-RED and in blynk use the “menu” to give my choice to node-RED.
But this would mean additional hardware, another single point of failure, more coding, more troubleshooting,…
Hello.
Yes, I understand. I mean “no benefits” for Blynk as platform. This topic has only 600 views… And half of them are most probably random views. So for us it means - spend a lot of efforts to fit needs of few people. While there other simple and “everyday” things we can do. Sorry, but in our list of 1000 features we have to think very carefully what feature put in the first place.
Hi,
Thanks for the response.
I understand. Will check if my alternative is any good 
Keep up the good work!
kr
1 Like
Hi Jeroen,
I think the raspberry pi with node-red is the best bridge for everything. 
Use Blynk to manage many devices that require these special features simplified (a button to manage multiple devices) is very complicated app and server side. As Dmitriy says it might not be worth “the game” if not for some fanatics of home automation, like us
To do “advanced things” I use this setup:
- Server made with a Raspebrry Pi with installed node-red + Blynk node library and mosquitto
- Devices with only the MQTT protocol installed.
The devices only talk to the server, node-red manages the devices and through the library updates the Blynk app. The app interacts with node-red that “physically” does the operations on devices via MQTT protocol.
Pro:
- Simplification of the blynk code, all virtualpin on nodered.
- No bridge blynk command for update multiple device
- Improved management and customized processes via node-red.
Cons:
- Increased complexity in nodered (for me it is not exactly a counter I like complex things)
Good look
Gabriele
1 Like
Plus 1 vote for Node-Red!
It’s a much better way of handling interactions between devices than Blynk Bridge in my opinion.
It also simplifies interaction with other devices or protocols. I use Amazon Alexa and Ikea TRÅDFRI plug-ins for Node-Red as well as @gab.lau’s excellent Blynk plug-in.
I’ve also created 433MHz and infrared to MQTT bridges that allow me to integrate with other devices as well.
Pete.
Hi. Another vote for this option, please.
I’m making a beehive monitoring app, which will hopefully be a commercial project in the not too distant future. Having a dropdown list, or other form of multi-device selector will make it easy for the user who wants to monitor 1 hive, or many, from the same app.
Having a run-time option to be able to add and delete devices from the run-time lookup list would be useful too, so if the user wanted to add new or delete old devices from the list of those available without having to do any recoding that would be a boon too.
Many Thanks
Tom
FYI - There is a new place for adding your vote or idea: