TLDR:
I feel like I wasted a day of my life over the Hue terms and conditions change, and am not convinced that the terms & conditions change panic was worth my time (…and I still “lost”, as I gave in to it). Perhaps you can commiserate with my frustration, or if you’re feeling charitable, tell me what I’m doing wrong.
Long story:
Like many of you, I own & operate about a dozen Hue light bulbs, and for many years. Unlike many of you, I am completely new to home assistant; I’ve never used it before. But, reading about the terms & conditions change for Philips Hue, I bought into the hyperbole, and decided I would do something about it.
I bought a Sonoff “P” zigbee dongle, and plugged it into my Unraid server. I set up Home Assistant (first in Docker, then in VM). I tried zigbee2mqtt and/or ZHA back-and-forth several times.
This stuff is NOT user-friendly. Home Assistant wasn’t a terrible experience; it is confusing, but it found & behaved well with most of the stuff in my house… except for those damn light bulbs. Perhaps I’m merely mediocre for this community, but I am easily the most technically savvy person I know in real life, and this was an exercise in frustration just for a dozen light bulbs.
Neither z2m nor zha was ever as good as the Philips hub. Maybe it was my dongle, or the extension cable, or a myriad of other variables I never had to consider with the Philips hub. ZHA was much easier to setup, but it was SLOW, requiring 4 full seconds to change a bulb 10 feet away, and that was when it worked. z2m never found all my bulbs, though its setup was so user-unfriendly it’s possible I was doing something wrong. I don’t think I ever got either system fully set up how I wanted it to be, and I just gave up after hours and hours of frustration. Because my wife expects this stuff to “just work,” I reluctantly went back to the Hue hub and… I had everything reconnected and restored in under an hour. And then, I laughed till I cried–setting up the Philips Hub in home assistant took 10 seconds.
There’s probably a better community than this for my frustration–as it’s not with HA but rather the light bulbs–but perhaps this community can tell me what I’m doing wrong. The idea of a fancy dongle to control my light bulbs without giving in to “the man” is still tempting, but it really needs to just work.
I have a conbee stick and pretty much everything works fine, without any noticable delay with ZHA. Maybe the hub is operating on a different channel with less interference? It is possible to switch channels in HA, but it requires re-pairing of all devices, so I’ve never dared to try that.
The Home Assistant has gone a long way towards user friendliness, but despite the fact, it’s still not even close.
That’s about the last step I took before I threw in the towel. It was on “auto”, and I tried changing the channel in ZHA and then couldn’t see a single bulb.
Or maybe a different step lost all bulbs? Honestly, it all felt a bit like voodoo.
The Sonoff “P” dongle seems to have a weak signal maybe?
For sure, my ZigBee network was absolute shit for over a year before adjusting WiFi channel and ZigBee channel. After that, everything has been 100% foolproof
The Phillips bridge has worked basically perfectly for a decade, and works entirely locally. So everyone with Philips bulbs just used the bridge apis from home assistant amd the app.
Up until extremely recently, no one had any will or motivation to make home assistant or anything like it work nicely with the bulbs without a hub. Why put the effort in if the bridge already solves all the problems and locally?
Obviously that has changed and I’m sure some people are trying to figure out how to make this all work nicely without a bridge, but it’s going to take time. Maybe a long time. I wouldn’t expect it to work well soon.
I found a lot of folks for whom everything seemed to just work… my experience wasn’t terrible but I did buy a few hundred bucks worth of Aqura sensors before realizing they weren’t super reliable.
So I’m kinda glad I didn’t get caught up in the Hue TOS fervor. It drives me nanners when they miss a beat ;-)
I don’t actually own a Hue bridge and have never used one in my setup, but have about a dozen Hue bulbs (and additional non-Hue bulbs when “budget” options would suffice). I have HA running in Docker on my NAS and Z2M running in Docker on a Pi4 (which also is running my Z-Wave container) placed in a more central location in my house, which has a Sonoff Zigbee. They communicate with each other via gigabit Ethernet. Altogether I have about 50 Zigbee devices on my network.
It did take a bit to get everything set up and communicating with each other, and I specifically chose Zigbee channels that don’t overlap with my WiFi (since they’re both 2.4ghz). But my light response is essentially instantaneous via my HA app or a bound smart switch, so it’s definitely doable without a bridge using existing tech.
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Tip for Australians.
Now that internet connection and account is required you can get a refund on all devices, regardless of age.
Also make sure to complain to the ACCC while you are at it.
Everyone’s got better consumer protections than the most consumerist country in the world
I have a conbee stick and pretty much everything works fine, without any noticable delay with ZHA. Maybe the hub is operating on a different channel with less interference? It is possible to switch channels in HA, but it requires re-pairing of all devices, so I’ve never dared to try that.
The Home Assistant has gone a long way towards user friendliness, but despite the fact, it’s still not even close.
That’s about the last step I took before I threw in the towel. It was on “auto”, and I tried changing the channel in ZHA and then couldn’t see a single bulb.
Or maybe a different step lost all bulbs? Honestly, it all felt a bit like voodoo.
The Sonoff “P” dongle seems to have a weak signal maybe?
For sure, my ZigBee network was absolute shit for over a year before adjusting WiFi channel and ZigBee channel. After that, everything has been 100% foolproof
The Phillips bridge has worked basically perfectly for a decade, and works entirely locally. So everyone with Philips bulbs just used the bridge apis from home assistant amd the app.
Up until extremely recently, no one had any will or motivation to make home assistant or anything like it work nicely with the bulbs without a hub. Why put the effort in if the bridge already solves all the problems and locally?
Obviously that has changed and I’m sure some people are trying to figure out how to make this all work nicely without a bridge, but it’s going to take time. Maybe a long time. I wouldn’t expect it to work well soon.
There’s already a
for HA that covers the use case where your hue bulbs operate entirely through voice assistants.
I’m hoping this sees expansion into a fully fledged replacement for the physical Phillips hub in the future.
I really appreciate this comment. I didn’t have this knowledge or perspective. Thanks for sharing. I’ll be patient.
I’ve been using HA for a years or two now and still found Zigbee stuff difficult to troubleshoot :-)
That’s simultaneously encouraging and discouraging to hear!
I found a lot of folks for whom everything seemed to just work… my experience wasn’t terrible but I did buy a few hundred bucks worth of Aqura sensors before realizing they weren’t super reliable.
So I’m kinda glad I didn’t get caught up in the Hue TOS fervor. It drives me nanners when they miss a beat ;-)
Sorry I don’t have real tips.
I don’t actually own a Hue bridge and have never used one in my setup, but have about a dozen Hue bulbs (and additional non-Hue bulbs when “budget” options would suffice). I have HA running in Docker on my NAS and Z2M running in Docker on a Pi4 (which also is running my Z-Wave container) placed in a more central location in my house, which has a Sonoff Zigbee. They communicate with each other via gigabit Ethernet. Altogether I have about 50 Zigbee devices on my network.
It did take a bit to get everything set up and communicating with each other, and I specifically chose Zigbee channels that don’t overlap with my WiFi (since they’re both 2.4ghz). But my light response is essentially instantaneous via my HA app or a bound smart switch, so it’s definitely doable without a bridge using existing tech.