Philips Hue + Wemo Switch + Smartthings Help

Hello,

First post here, love the site. I know you support the Philips Hue and Wemo Wall Switch. My questions revolves around a problem i have with Phillips Hue. I’ve googled the crap out of this and am hoping for some forum help. Questions as follows:

  1. Will the Wemo when switched to off, still allow me to use the Philips Hue, or is it the essentially the same as flicking a regular wall switch off?

  2. If so, do i need a Smartthings hub as the brain for this, or can the Wemo’s “off” setting be programmed independently to turn off the Philips Hue but keep the power flowing.

If you are replacing a switch that controls the socket your Hue is screwed into. The best thing to do would be to change the wiring so that the socket is always on, and also powering the Wemo switch. This way the socket is always on, but with other interaction you can turn the Hue bulb on or off with the Wemo switch.

You don’t have to have a ST hub for this scenario as both the Wemo Switch and Hue with a Hue hub work without any other interaction other than an app on your smartphone.

Once scenario if you wire it as I mention above, you can use IFTTT to tell the Hue to turn on/off when pressing the Wemo Switch.

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Thanks for your reply mattjfrank. I wasn’t aware i could wire the switch that way, so that answers question 1.

As for question 2, i prefer not to use IFTTT for lighting/switch combinations since I’ve heard it’s quite slow to react. If the switch itself cannot be programmed, and i don’t use IFTTT, is Smartthings a good medium to translate the bulb on/off command to Philips Hue for me?

Essentially the Wemo would be a wired, programmed switch, strictly for on/off functionality, while the Hue would can still be manipulated by other programs like IFTTT email flashing/NEST commands, etc.

Yes you can use ST and setup the wemo to control on/off of the hue. It does have a few second delay, but it works.

I believe the newly launched Philips Hue Tap will also perform what im looking for. Thanks for your help.

I’m waiting for confirmation that Phillips Hue Tap works w/out the Hue Bridge. If it does, I just may get me one. I use the 2 Hue Bulbs and will be adding a light strip next month but I use them w/out the hue bridge.

Matt, ST told me I need the ST hub to access my WeMo motion sensor…
I wanted to try out the ST app before purchasing the hub etc. I playing with the app now but it’s not finding my WeMo motion or switch (I do not own a hub yet).

Same with my TCP connected bulbs, app is not finding them.

Thanks

I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure you need the hub to talk to any WeMo devices. The app doesn’t talk to them, the hub does. The app talks to the hub, then the hub talks to the devices over the network.

Thanks. I guess I miss read your first post above.

I have 3 taps but I added it to the hue hub. Wall mounted two and one stays on my coffee table…

Matt, if you don’t mind sharing, how do you wire the socket to always be on, but also powering the Wemo switch? Will this allow IFTTT to turn the Hue lights on and off (but keep power to them all the time)? This would be a great solution for me. I currently have the Hue lights wired normally to the Wemo switch, but its definitely not ideal.

I don’t really like to give electrical advice, you should contact an electrician if you have questions.

For me, I connected the hot directly to the load. These are the two wires that are connected to the existing switch. Then I connected those to the hot on the WeMo. Generally there are another set of wires in the switch box that are not connected to the switch but are connected to each other. Those would get connected to the neutral on the WeMo. The ground to ground and then I capped the Load wire on the WeMo.

Thanks Matt, I do appreciate the explanation of what you did and I do understand the word of caution. I currently own a bunch of Hue and 4 Wemo wall switches that I have not set up yet other than the one I mentioned above. I will cautiously follow your directions tonight and possibly consult my uncle who lives in florida and is a journeyman. This will solve one of my two remaining road blocks to nirvana. The second one that I came across that I had not considered is that IFTTT currently only controls individual lights or all your lights. Because I have Hue in multiple rooms, this is not particularly helpful for me. Do you know of any way to get this working with groups? Does smartthings integration change the picture at all for me or give me any additional functionality in regards to my lights?

The other part to all of this is doing exactly that.

You can use SmartApp’s like Dim With me or The Big Switch to control groups of lights. You’ll also need to use a Virtual Switch App to tie your WeMo switch to your groups. There are lots of threads about Virtual Switches, Dim With Me and The Big Switch.

Thank you for the tip. Researching this, it appears that “the big switch” may be my best bet and to essentially follow the directions from this thread:
"Virtual Switch to turn on/off Multiple Lights Based on IFTTT Trigger Event?"
I will need to buy a smartthings Hub which is fine. Including what you helped me with above (the Wemo switch wired with power but having the bulbs always be powered), does this sound like the best solution or is there something else out there that I need to look into first?

It’s my understanding you could do this w/out SmartThings. Using the Hue App, IFTTT. I’d recommend the SmartThings hub because you can expand on your setup at anytime.

Here is a referral/discount link http://fbuy.me/4hzd for buying the SmartThings Hub at 10% off if you wish. You can purchase without the referral/discount link directly from http://shop.smartthings.com

Using the Hue App and IFTTT, I am able to use IFTTT to trigger Hue to turn on or do multiple things to all the lights or a single light of my choosing, but I cannot choose a group of lights or choose a “scene” to display. Either one of these last options would be fine. Am I missing something?

I have hues, but I don’t have the hue app and I don’t use IFTTT so that question is better answered to someone else. I just know I’ve read before that the hue app is very powerful, but I’m not sure how much of that is lost when using it in combination with IFTTT

Ahh, I see. Yes, the app itself is nice (although a couple of the pay apps are considerably better and worth the money) and can do this, but IFTTT doesn’t integrate fully with the app and therefore can’t do “scenes” (yet?). I think that a solution may be to run an individual IFTTT script for each of the lights and associate each one with the status of the wemo switch. For me, that will likely mean 6 IFTTT recipes to turn on my 6 BR30 lights in one room and more for other rooms/locations. I’ll have to experiment with this tonight when I get home and hope they all trigger. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to look into the smartthings solution. I may still buy one, but not immediately if I can get away without it (KISS principle). Thanks for your help! Its has been very beneficial to the thought process.

Thanks to your help Matt, I was able to wire my switch last night and I implemented the individual commands. It works well. As I have read in other posts, there is about a 5 second delay in the response from when the virtual switch is pressed until the lights fire one at a time, but for my purposes, this is entirely acceptable. Thanks again for your help.