Hue bulb without Hue Bridge?

Devices & Integrations
92

Bob, directly connecting the Hue bulbs to the SmartThings hub may not be the path you want to follow. The bulbs and the remotes that control them are designed to work with the ZigBee Light Link profile (Hue Hub). I fear this thread and others like it may be leading you down a path of rooting through logs and manually applying custom device types and I hate to see you go through that if its not necessary.

Everything will just work if you keep the bulbs and remotes on the Hue hub! Its what they were designed for. Running the bulbs directly connected to SmartThings is an unnatural act with few benefits.

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93

I don’t have a Hue hub and don’t want to buy one if I don’t have to.

94

The price of the Hue hub is now down to $60 since you can buy it separately.

It’s not cheap, but I can pretty much guarantee that if you don’t have a bridge you’ll spend at least an extra 15 hours making things work.

Plus the fact that Smartthings support can’t help you much if you do get stuck on anything since their recommended method is to use the bridge.

And if you do have it, you can open up direct connections with other multiple partnerships which you might find valuable.

But it’s a personal choice. :sunglasses:

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95

Although it’s not available separately as of now. A little birdie told me November 1 is the day to look out for. :slight_smile:

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96

So the bottom line is even with ST V2, it sounds like the recommended route is to get the bridge… I suppose that’s especially true if I want to do “fancy” things like sync my bulbs to TV or music or something like in all the hue promo videos rather than just on/off with a chosen color…

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97

I decided the default direct connect device type wasn’t good enough, so I got a little crazy. Here’s the end result.

All Hue A19 bulbs (both new and old) are actually extended color lights, so you can use the color temp portion of Zigbee and the bulb goes to “White” mode for a pleasing array of natural white light. I also brought in some color naming from the Osram Gardenspot devicetype and applied it to the main tile. The last trick is that the two white presets in the color picker, go directly to 2700K and 3500K white instead of trying to approximate it via hue/saturation values.

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98

OMG. I guess you did. It looks awesome. If we are going to have a Dodger Blue then we need a Cardinal Red!!

Here is a pic of how it looks on my iPhone:

Well done sir!!

99

Thank you! Hopefully having ~30 different state options isn’t too taxing. It’s really nice that it works from the Room/Things view too, so the little icon on the right will be the appropriate color and name.

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100

Very cool! I will try it out later. In the meantime, a lay person’s update to what I did over the last couple of days (because I suspect there will be others in my shoes soon):

Went with the “recommended” hue bridge 2.0. Now I have four A19 bulbs hooked into hue bridge and the hue bridge and all 4 bulbs visible in ST V2. Used the setup instructions from ST website but took a little bit to set up as for some reason the bulbs didn’t get added to ST on the first try (even though the hub did).

My current conundrum is collision between ST automations and what Hue is trying to do. My setup is 2 sconces with 2 bulbs per sconce. So there are some situations where I want the bulbs to behave independently (party, etc) but for most of the time, I want them to behave in pairs so each sconce turns on together.

I tried the Color Coordinator SmartApp from Michael Struck but had some sync issues (the master bulb didn’t always reset to the last on color when turning on from off). So for now I am relegated to using the SmartLight automation to just turning them on/off through ST and then switching to the hue app to set scenes, etc. It’s a bit of a pain though - anyone have ideas?

I am setting up an Echo tonight so I am hoping to bypass this whole problem by being able to say “Set Living Room Left to white” or “Set Living Room Right to blue”…

101

Very Cool! You made my ST Connected hue bulbs even more fun :smile:

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102

If your Hues are on the hue bridge, you can use the Hue IFTTT channel as well. So set up a virtual switch in SmartThings and then use that as the IF for your Recipe. That will also work with the echo/smart things integration. It’s one of the easiest ways to have echo blink your Hue lights, for example.

Depending on what you want to do though it can be a huge amount of set up work.

There is one cool option: you can match the Hue colors to a picture at a URL.

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103

The screenshots in this thread are from iOS. Does the Color palette button render in Android? I know the Up & Down buttons don’t.

104

Was looking at log events for your code and saw

groovy.lang.MissingMethodException: No signature of method: script1446219109605156443044.zigbeeSetLevel() is applicable for argument types: (java.lang.String) values: [cc] @ line 296

A quick trawl and I found that this definition is missing from the code:

def zigbeeSetLevel(level) {
    "st cmd 0x${device.deviceNetworkId} ${endpointId} 8 4 {${level} 1500}"
}

Adding that in resolved the error. Thanks for the updated device code - works well on my Android device as well!

HTH,
Ian

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105

Thanks for catching that! I didn’t realize that was being called. I’ll update the github code.

106

Happy to help. The other fix I did was to remove the “unreachable” events which were spamming my Activity Feed.

Did this by adding “displayed: false” to all “unreachable” events e.g.

sendEvent(name: "unreachable", value: 0, displayed: false)

Ian

107

Good idea there too. If you know github, you can make a pull request and I can update the code with your fixes directly. Otherwise, I’ll make both later today.

Update: These changes were made as well as a fix for the main color tile when turning on and the previous color was White. Grab the updated code from GitHub.

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108

@Sticks18, i am trying to create the app from code, but I am getting the following error:

Pasted image1103×99 10.2 KB

Oops!. Never mind. It’s a device.

109

Would this work with Hue Lightstrip Plus if it is connected directly to ST with no Hue hub?

110

Yes and no. It should be functional, but the color names/background colors may look incorrect because the Lightstrip Plus uses a wider color gamut than the Hue bulbs, particularly in the greens.

111

I’ve got the Hue Lightstrip Plus directly connected to ST with no Hue Hub and this works just fine. The gamut is restricted somewhat so I’ll take a look at @Sticks18 code to see what changes would be required to get full range.

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