Adding an extra motion sensor; through Philips Hue

So i have a Philips Hue motion sensor… it is connected to the Hue hub.

I want to add it to smartthings; however i cant get it added… I want to keep it connected to the Hue hub, and for it to get discovered by the smartthings hub so i can run automations with it. Normaly new hue lights connected to the hue hub show up when “searching for devices” with the ST hub, however not this time. I tried restarting aswell (Hue and ST) ; no luck.

Extra info: When removing hue lights; and then adding then connecting them back to the Hue bridge. They instantly get picked up by the ST bridge when scanning for new devices. Just seems like the motion detectors from hue dont do the same.

Why not connect the hue motion sensor directly to the smartthings hub you ask? I want to use the zigbee network of the Hue hub. Using the zigbee network of the ST hub it would not reach the distance.

At the present time the official ST/Hue local integration only exposes the lights, not the sensors. I’m not sure why: other integrations, including HomeKit and Alexa and even the ST/Hue cloud to cloud integration (as @Automated_House notes below) , can use the motion sensors that are connected to the Hue bridge. However, when the motion sensor was first released it was not usable through integrations, so maybe the ST local integration just never got updated.

The good news is that specifically since the Hue motion sensor connected to the Hue bridge is visible to HomeKit, I am mildly optimistic that it will eventually be visible to SmartThings through Matter. But no promises. :thinking:

Meanwhile, you can use Alexa routines (not SmartThings routines) as an intermediary if you like.

@blueyetisoftware has been working on some Hue edge drivers for the Hue bridge, but I don’t know if they include the sensors yet.

Yeah; it seems smartthings wont detect the sensors (anymore).

When i think about it now… before i had the Hue hub linked through the cloud (not local). And back then the sensors were seen by the smartthings hub (but being connected to the Hue hub).

But for obvious reasons i want to keep the hue/smartthings link local.

It’s not a big deal… though; i’ll just add an extra socket in the garden to extend the Smartthings zigbee range.

Looking at using the Hue motion detectors with the Hue app there’s also benefits. They work well if you only plan on letting them turn on / off lights in some cases (id dare say even better than with smartthings in some situations).

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The cloud-to-cloud/hubless option for integrating hue to SmartThings apparently started showing the motion sensors in SmartThings a couple months ago. You can add both the hub and non-hub option to get the motions sensors to show, but then you’ll have duplicates of all your bulbs.

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The sensors are included in the driver. Once SSE is released for ST, they will go live in the driver and provide temp, illuminance and battery in addition to the motion info.

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So about the Edge driver for the Hue bridge… What’s the benefit over just directly connecting it through the “Normal way” to the ST hub?

More control over the hub and it’s connected lights / sensors / plugs?

And will you still be able to use the Hue app and all it’s functions like normal?

The “normal way” with the old architecture used a groovy device type handler. These will all be going away soon as smartthings transitions to a new architecture. At that point, all Zigbee and zwave devices will use edge drivers written in LUA instead of device type handlers. All edge drivers run locally on your own hub.

See the community FAQ for more details.

FAQ: I have no idea what Edge is. Is that a new developer tool? (2022)

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I am aware of the Edge drivers; already using them on multiple devices i have connected to my Hub.

Didnt know the Hue bridge / ST hub link used the old architecture… Good thing it becomes Edge!

The more edge the better!

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