The reason connecting through the Hue bridge is the officially recommended way is that Phillips did not originally provide anyway to factory reset an individual bulb once it had been connected to a zigbee controller. It wasn’t even easy to move bulbs to a new bridge. (Most zigbee bulbs can be individually reset with a blink pattern, but hues cannot.)
Consequently, adding bulbs directly to the smart things hub without using a Hue bridge meant that it was often very difficult to take those bulbs off the bridg even just to move bulbs to a new bridge.
There was an additional wrinkle because the Hue bridge uses the ZLL (zigbee light link) profile and the smartthings hub uses the ZHA (zigbeE home automation) profile. ZHA has more channels than ZLL, and if you linked a bulb directly to the Hub it was possible that you might be putting the bulb onto a channel where other ZLL devices would never be able to find it.
Consequently, adding bulbs directly to the smartthings hub without using a Hue bridge meant that it was often very difficult to take those bulbs off the hub later.
However, since that advice, there are now several ways to reset an individual bulb. The easiest is probably with the $30 Lutron connected bulb remote, which can reset an individual bulb on any Zigbee channel. So now you don’t run the risk of the bulb being locked to the smart things hub forever. But still requires buying an extra $30 device just for the purpose of resetting, smartthings doesn’t want to make that their recommended method.
As far as color goes, smartthings is able to adjust color on a number of different devices, such as the fibaro RGBW controller, Zwave RGB bulb, and a hue color bulb.
Maybe @smart can post a screenshot of his mobile app showing the device tile. He has a lot of colors hues. I only have the white ones.
That’s really helpful - thanks! A screenshot would be really helpful. Kind of afraid investing so much in colorful bulbs without being sure I can get the color out of them. I am looking at the feature matrix here and frankly can’t tell what’s “obviously possible” and what is (if anything) a hue-only thing - http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/products/. I feel like it’s 1995 and there’s an AOL cd telling me that I need AOL to get on the internet and I don’t know any better. For example, lightstrip vs lightstrip plus - the plus is telling me it has “create your ambience” and the regular lightstrip “doesn’t” but from what I can tell, it’s just being able to change color on a schedule - something I can do with just ST or IFTTT or similar.
I’ve tried setting the device type to Cree, GE Link and Zigbee Hue bulb, but no success. I’m afraid your suggestion to force the configure () to run again via the simulator is beyond my skill level. Can you dummy that down and translate into more remedial terms? Thanks for your help!!!
Sorry should have stated that the above was in reply to Sticks18 and in reference to trying to control a Hue Lux bulb connected directly to the ST hub (v1)
“Create your ambience” is a term that Phillips used to distinguish between “color changing” (which means different colors like red, blue, orange,) and “ambience” (which means different color temperatures of white from cool white to warm white) .
the right ambience for any moment with a range of beautiful, natural white light. Use the app to set any shade of white light, from cool energizing daylight to relaxing warm white light. So set the mood. Change the ambience. Feel different. Feel better.
Originally only the color Hue bulbs and Lux bulbs could do white light, and the “friends of hue” did RGB.
However, the hue name has now pretty much become the brand name for the whole line, and so that division has gotten lost.
The new models are also generally brighter than the previous generation.
The new models are now named:
Hue white and color (replaces the old Hue)
Hue white (replaces the old lux)
Hue lightstrip plus (replaces the old lightstrip)
The old models will continue to be sold while inventory is available,
So if I understand you right, since the new lightstrip+ is rgbw, I could set those cool and warm whites directly through ST rather than having to go through the bridge? I just ordered some. I’ll post a screenshot here in a couple of days for other folks to see once I figure out how to set this up. Crossing my fingers that I don’t have to go back and buy the bridge
I’ve gone back and forth on both. For a while the Hue integration was real bad before Juan cleaned it up. I have about half my bulbs connecting via Hue, and half via the ST hub now. My one recommendation is to add one (just one, it doesn’t matter which) Hue (connect) bulb to Pollster and make it refresh once per minute. This keeps things a lot fresher.
I use the default device type for the hue bulb. I agree it is not what it cold be.
As for the binding, the Hue bulbs do not support attribute reporting (at least the first gen of bulbs don’t) the only way to find a bulb’s color, level, and on/off status is to poll the device.
Correction to the above: I need to clarify what I was trying to say. The Hue bulbs (Gen 1) report their attributes just fine. What the bulbs don’t do is support binding. So since the bulbs can’t be bound to a ZigBee address they do not support attribute reporting in that since. You can’t configure a Gen 1 bulb to report its attributes to a bound address since the Gen 1 bulb doesn’t support binding.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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”…
