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

Devices & Integrations Connected Things
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My housemate brought home a Hue Lux starter kit and a Wemo switch today, so I can answer my own question:

Yes, it works! The actual bulb (in this case, a $15 GE Link which is controlled by the Hue bridge) will act as a “man in the middle” between Echo and SmartThings, using the Big Switch smartapp.

The only problem is the delay. At my house, the time between giving a voice command to Alexa to turn off the Big Switch bulb and the time when SmartThings fires the Big Switch app and does whatever else I have associated with it is running about 4 minutes.

That’s fine for a lot of things for me, like turning stuff off at night, or when I leave the house, or some other use cases where a 5 minute lag between request and action is acceptable.

Obviously not great for use cases where you’re standing there waiting for something to happen. But for anything where the lag is acceptable, I now have Alexa voice control over anything I can run off a switch event. Which is actually pretty awesome. :smile:

@Tyler this doesn’t get you guys off the hook for coming up with eventual official Echo integration, of course, but it does mean that right now SmartThings is a value add to Echo, not just the other way around.

p.s. I did run into one weird ST error…if I added the Hue Bridge to Echo before I added it to ST, ST wouldn’t save the bridge details in the device list. If I added it the other way around, no problem, both Echo and ST can control the bulbs. I reported that to support.

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BTW, the WeMo (bought at Best Buy this morning), unfortunately lived up to its reputation and proved to be defective. But it took me 25 minutes on the phone with Belkin support to verify that. Annoying, but at least I’m saved the temptation to replace all the light switches!

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Long before I bought my Smart Things devices I tried wemo plugs. They were Terrible, buggy, didn’t work as documented, support was terrible and were extremely easy to return to Best Buy :smile:

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Hue Bridge + Echo/Smart Things working like a charm here. I find myself talking to Alexa more than my clients!

THIS is the future of Home Automation. Smart Things needs to pickup the pace or they are going to be left behind quick. Considering the abysmal lack of progress on the Smart Things app UI I’m a bit concerned.

But Hue with Echo is a win!

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JDRoberts I’m not seeing ANY delay. Time from command to action is about 2-3 seconds, tops. But maybe I’m not understanding correctly. I’m not using Smart Things (I haven’t used the app now that I have Echo + HUE) but you are saying you have something else in the mix? For HUE lamps I am wondering why since it works great right out of the box using device names and Echo groups.

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No delay at all for anything that echo has official integration with, that’s all working great.

But I have some nonHue lights on zwave switches that are controlled by smartthings. So what I’ve done is use “the big switch” smart app to set a Hue bulb as the master and a zwave switch as the follower. Then when I tell Echo to turn the hue bulb on/off, the zwave switch will follow, effectively giving me voice control over the zwave switch as part of a group with the hue bulb master.

This is working very well except that I’m seeing about a minute delay between when the group’s master changes and when the follower does.

So I’m using it for situations where there is a natural group, like a hue bulb in the nightstand lamp and a zwave switch controlling the tall lamp in the same room. I use Echo to voice control the nightstand light and the tall lamp follows along shortly.

I can also use it with a virtual switch as the follower to then trigger any hello home action or custom smartapp.

So it just depends on the use case. Since I already had zwave switches and hello home actions, I wanted Echo control of those as well.

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So just to be clear then, say I have ST V2 + Hue Bridge V2 + some RGBW bulbs + Amazon Echo… I see you can control your hue bulbs with Echo -> Hue via voice or ST -> Hue via UI but I have to be careful not to connect the bulbs to Echo through both Hue and ST since there is name collision (you can see that in a couple of the posts/videos). That leads me to think that I want to link my bulbs in ST through Hue so I can control them as part of whole home automation but link them in Echo only through Hue so I can say things like “turn living room lights on” or “make living room blue”. Has anyone set this up with V2 of everything? Am I thinking correctly? And am I correct in understanding that if I tell Echo to turn on a hue light, the ST UI will know that it’s on almost immediately in this configuration? Thanks!

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Yes to all of the above except for the

ST UI Will know that it’s on almost immediately

Smart things polls the hue bridge about every five minutes. So it just depends where you catch it in the cycle. Could be almost immediately, it could be up to five minutes before the UI updates. But everything else works great.

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I’m currently using a Hue bridge tied to Echo and ST.

Still tinkering with my system. Some lights are not reliable (cree bulbs mostly) Might start paring more items with the hue bridge directly as the ones on that seem more reliable.