Hue Bridge + Echo co exists with same Hue Bridge + SmartThings?

I’m having vision issues today so I can’t do much research. My housemate really really wants to buy some HA stuff to control with the echo. (He’s in love with the echo.) I vetoed WeMo switches for now. But Philips Hues are a good longterm investment no matter what we end up with.

Right now we have one GE link bulb, works fine with ST, no bridge. (our ST hub is on zigbee channel 20, not that that should matter since this question is about the Hue bridge anyway.) All our other networked lights are zwave switches.

So my question is if he gets a hue bridge to set up with the echo, can we also connect to the same Hue bridge with SmartThings?

Thanks!

My only understanding of the Hue oddities are connecting a bulb directly to ST without the bridge can “lock” it to ST. I think as long as you go through the bridge you can authorise it to as many services as you want.

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Yep :smile:


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@JDRoberts I have it set up on Echo as well as ST.

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Thanks!

BTW, one known oddity: apparently Echo will only allow control of 18 devices through a Hue bridge. More than that and it won’t recognize the Hue bridge at all. Weird.

http://www.developers.meethue.com/content/amazon-echo-and-hue-bridge-discovery-problems

That problem appears to depend on which zigbee channel your smartthings have is using.

Thr ST hub is using the ZIGBEE home automation profile, not the zigbee light LINK profile.

ZLL uses a subset of the ZHA channels. In particular channel 14, which may be used by an ST hub, is supported by ZHA but not ZLL.

For the 1st generation ST hub, zigbee channel is randomly assigned at time of manufacture and can’t be changed by the user.

So if you happened to get a hub using channel 14 and you connect zigbee lightbulbs DIRECTLY to it, they will have to use the ZHA profile. (Through the bridge there’s no issue, that’s cloud to cloud.)

Anyway, it’s not the profile that’s the problem, it’s the channel number. Once the bulbs are changed to channel 14, they are not discoverable by other ZLL devices.

So that’s why it looks like the bulbs are “locked” to the ST hub. They’re not really, but in that scenario they are set on channel 14 so only another ZHA controller could talk to them.

OTOH, if you happened to get an ST hub that operates on channel 20, you probably wouldn’t run into the “locked” problem, which is why only some people had the issue. But ST support still recommends going through the bridge for Hues.

@JDRoberts Will try this out once I get back home… I have 20 bulbs.

Yes, I have that exact setup and it works just fine. Can control the Hue lights with either system, Echo or ST. FYI!

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@JDRoberts I have my Hue bridge hooked up to both my Echos and ST, and they all work great. Echo is much faster responsiveness w/ my Hue than SmartThings.

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@JDRoberts I’m on Zigbee Channel 14 as well, I have 2 GE link lights connected directly to my Hub, and the 8 Hue Bulbs I have are connected to the Hue Bridge which is connected to both my ST and my Echos.

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Sounds like it’s a go then. I’ll tell him he can go ahead and get the Phillips. He’ll probably get a WeMo switch for his room as well. But I’m not doing tech-support for that. :wink:

@JDRoberts WeMo is fine if you do NOT use it through ST. I have a WeMo Light Switch, WeMo Switch and WeMo Insight Switch and they all work well as long as you don’t use them through ST. The ST integration with WeMo has been horrible, so I removed them from ST and they work fine. They work great w/ the Echo, as easy as the Hue bulbs.

Good to know, thanks!

I’ve given up on the “native” Wemo app too… it’s a shame because my two insights are nice devices, their services just suck. I wish I could just treat it as a lan device and bypass the cloud.

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Does WeMo have a LAN API like Hue Bridge? Even if, I guess it is still difficult (impossible?) to manually configure a SmartThings Device Service Manager with a static LAN address, right? Am I mistaken?

Most of that’s a little over my head. From what I’ve heard they are cloud only… kind of… Somebody hacked it locally a while ago and they locked it down pretty good.

OK, a related dumb/weird question. (Remember I don’t have a Philips Hue bridge yet.)

If I have a Hue bridge known to both Echo and SmartThings, and I have Echo turn on one Hue bulb, can I use Big Switch to subscribe to that event and turn on other devices?

And if yes, is there the typical Hue polling lag of around 5 minutes, or is it quicker?

And if yes, would the same thing work with a WeMo switch, or does that integration not support that case? (I know I can use a WeMo switch as the IF for IFTTT, and that a Hue bulb cannot be an IFTTT trigger. I’m asking about the cloud to cloud ST integrations, no additional middlemen.)

@smart do you have any of your Echo-controlled Hues set up as the master switch in Big Switch to trigger a non Echo-controlled device?

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@JDRoberts haven’t tried it but will certainly give it a shot… The hue polling (native ST polling) as such doesn’t always work. But let me check.,

Echo and ST hub work fine independently with Hue Bulbs for me. Echo integration works way quicker than ST control. Wemo also works much better with Echo than with ST.

Excited to see more HA devices hooked up with Echo but also excited to see what Apple are about to do with HomeKit and the new Apple TV/iOs App.

Yeah, I feel the same way!

Have you tried setting up The Big Switch smartapp using just one of your Echo-controlled hues as the master switch and something that isn’t echo-controlled, like a virtual switch or a zwave switch, to see what happens when you turn the master bulb on with Echo?

That’s what I’m curious about right now. Even if it’s a 15 minute delay, it would work for some use cases like first thing in the mornng or last thing at night.